Finding ways to harness the knowledge, experience and creativity of your people doing the work, you need to look deep inside your organization and listen to your people’s voices – where ever they are located. With our increasingly distributed workforces, working virtually, appreciating what’s on our employee minds has never been more important.
The most important people leadership behavior to cultivate is empowering your talent to have the courage to say what needs to be said and authentically listening without suspending judgement, and ensuring their voices are protected, respected, and heard.
Today, many of our current employee engagement methods are lagging indicators versus leading indicators. For example, employee satisfaction surveys happen only once a year and the data is often over a year old when it is analyzed and cascaded for discovery to leadership teams to build employee satisfaction improvement plans.
More often than not, the current state is no longer relevant to the survey results, yet we build action programs against outdated data and often data that is flawed in authenticity.
Bottomline, the data insights are simply too slow to garner timely actionable insights, and usually the survey data is not accurate. Unfortunately, according to many research studies, 50% of employees are less than truthful in their annual survey or pulse feedback. There’s no way to guarantee the accuracy of the responses, and employees may lie about their position and managers in fear of losing favor or their job.
Although, HR leaders often supplement their employee annual surveys with random pulse surveys to provide spot checking insights on larger scale initiatives from an M&A, or major organizational initiative (new ERP System, etc), or enable managers to customize questions relevant to their operating needs, they still don’t have accurate longitudinal 7×24 data streams which are needed to help predict what lies ahead and engage effectively to solve the challenges before they become multi-million dollar problems.
Amidst these outdated employee engagement HR practices which are striving to gain insights or identify risks, organizations are increasingly coping with a continuing mental health crisis (Facts from NAMI – National Alliance for Mental Illness).
Did you know that?
- 1 in 5 U.S. adults experience mental illness each year
- 1 in 20 U.S. adults experience serious mental illness each year
- 1 in 6 U.S. youth aged 6-17 experience a mental health disorder each year
- 50% of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14, and 75% by age 24
- Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among people aged 10-14
Adding to these mental health concerns, we know that 20-30% of employees wake up sad or angry every day world-wide and employees are increasingly not happy.
To put this concern in perspective, since 2020, employee happiness has seen a steep 40% rate of decline for its trend line. Unhappiness accelerated in 2023 as the trend line dipped to a decreasing rate of 89%. The industry’s average eNPS has dropped about 4 points each year since 2020.
In addition, according to Gallup’s July 2023 survey, 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the US. Job satisfaction has dropped by 8% since 2019.
Although, three-quarters of Americans plan to start the New Year with a resolution to be more healthy, including 28% who want to focus on improving their mental health, according to a recent American Psychiatric Association (APA) – Healthy Minds poll. These folks plan to exercise more (67%), meditate (49%), keep a diary (26%), or see a therapist (35%) or psychiatrist (21%), according to the results of the research poll.
Although these are ambitious goals, most new year resolutions are not successfully executed upon. Researchers suggest that less than 9% of Americans that make resolutions complete them. In fact, research shows that 23% of people quit their resolution by the end of the first week, and 43% quit by the end of January. So as noble the plans are, the soldiers don’t line up to a successful mission (goal realization).
Needless to say then – Board Directors, CEOs, and Chief Human Resource Officers have a responsibility to empower employees and improve engagement practices to identify more daily feedback on how their employees are really feeling. Getting our people to higher levels of happiness is key to unlock trillions of economic power.
What should leaders be doing ?
Leaders, whether CEOs, CHRO’s or functional leaders, should be exploring the value of AI intelligence tools that use data-driven, 7×24 real-time approaches to employee employee happiness to gain insights into how employees are really feeling, and capturing rich text – string (verbatims) which can be mined used natural language processing (NLP) methods. What’s key is correlating all the data sources into optimized data analytics – people centric leadership dashboards. But make this visible to all employees —more transparency is important in organizations and everyone can contribute to the #happinessmatters leadership agenda.
Conclusion:
Casual or observational methods won’t give you the full truth, as employees may conceal their unhappiness for fear of backlash. Or worse, executive leaders may have little idea that morale is at risk, until it begins to show up in costly turnover or lost productivity. Augmenting HR current methods with real time data, which leverage AI methods (sentiment mining, natural language processing are powerful new approaches to supplement existing HR practices with leading indicators that can predict employee turnover, attrition or rising health claims and provide access to helpful content).
Making employee engagement healthier is a priority daily and it starts with ensuring your employees are happier, why these newer AI “people centric” applications can offer profound benefits.
John Heer, former CEO in the health care field summed it up nicely when he stated earlier this year:
“Imagine a workforce so engaged that they were giving you great ideas, they were innovating, they were willing to make the changes that you were trying to instate. . . . They create customer loyalty, higher-quality products and services. They actually participate and help with financial performance, and you can have growth because you’re doing all of those things well.”
#HappinessMatters
Note:
Happiness AI products to be aware of: ActiveTrak, Kaji, MoodInsights to name a few.
