The importance of a positive employee experience is becoming increasingly apparent. When employees are content, they’re more engaged, motivated, and productive.
While pursuing things like employee rewards, advanced technology, and office perks can be exciting, it’s best to start by ensuring your corporate culture is inclusive.
Here are three tips for creating an inclusive employee experience.
3 Ways To Create an Inclusive Employee Experience
1. Get Leadership on Board
The employee experience, or the journey that an employee experiences from hire through departure is the foundation of how employees feel about their work and employer.
This starts as early as attracting candidates to your organization and culminates with employee development. The employee experience journey must be embraced at the top to achieve success.
This means that leadership–most importantly the CEO–must be actively invested in the employee experience, rather than passing it along to HR to handle.
CEOs and executive teams must understand, advocate for, and invest in a successful employee experience.
2. Start Small
It’s easy to overthink the concept of employee experience.
However, creating a meaningful employee experience is actually quite simple. It can most commonly be defined by three key values:
- Respect: When employees feel respected and psychologically safe, they’re more likely to share ideas and perspectives that positively impact their work.
- Clear communication: When communication is deliberate and transparency is valued, there’s less confusion and increased productivity.
- Diversity and inclusion: When employees feel represented in their workplace and industry, diversity of thought is championed and innovation flourishes.
Unfortunately, this might be where the simplicity stops. It’s easy to get behind these concepts, but harder to implement them.
Once the executive team is bought in, consider starting small, perhaps with something as straightforward as improved communication. A commitment by leadership to transparent and honest communication, even during challenging times, will promote trust between employer and employee.
As a next step, your organization might consider opportunities for increased diversity. This might mean actively hiring or seeking opinions from employees of varying genders, ethnicities, and ages.
Committing to diversity will increase an organization’s diversity of thought and experience and may even make teams smarter.
3. Be Thoughtful About the “Business Case”
While efforts to increase communication, inclusion, and diversity are usually well intended, many businesses often tout the benefits of diversity and inclusion on profits.
New research has proved this can be counterproductive.
According to a Forbes article, when diversity is linked to corporate profits, underrepresented and marginalized groups are more likely to anticipate less belonging in an organization. This makes it less likely that they’ll want to be part of your organization, decreasing the effectiveness of your diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Organizations must remain thoughtful about messaging, avoiding the trap of disengaging those they’re trying to attract.
Improving Inclusion With Teamraderie
The employee experience is truly a journey that involves all levels of an organization. Inclusivity has a profound impact on its success.
With the commitment of leadership and involvement of employees, organizations can create an environment where employees thrive, contribute their best work, and feel a deep connection to their workplace.
If you’re hoping to cultivate an inclusive culture, Teamraderie’s team experiences are an excellent place to start. These live, virtual workshops are excellent for improving team connection and inclusion.
Click here to explore our experience finder to find the perfect experience for your team.
