The relationship between employers and employees has shifted over the last few years. Knowing how employees feel and think is critical for navigating the challenging market in 2023, where effective leadership will also be paramount. Enabling leaders with more frequent data-driven insights across the holistic employee experience must be a priority. A changing world of work also requires different leadership styles and capabilities - in this context, organisations will need to revisit their leadership capability frameworks and invest in the growth and development of leaders at all levels. Dr Crissa Sumner, Head of Employee Solution Strategy, Qualtrics, ANZ, and Liching Yew, Principal Solutions Engineer Employee Experience, Qualtrics, share insights from the 2023 Employee Experience Trends report with practical hints and tips for organisations to drive manager and leader effectiveness in the new era of work.

The current state of employee engagement

The focus today must be on designing a welcoming experience for both customers and employees. Work, social and economic upheavals have led to dramatic changes between employees and employers, driving  HR leaders to navigate organisations like never before. Dr Crissa Sumner delves deeper into this truth with the Qualtrics study and proposes the Qualtrics-validated EX25 model. This framework outlines the Employee Experience (EX) KPIs around Employee Engagement, Experience versus Expectations, Intent to Stay, Inclusion, and Well-being. These KPIs are, in turn, driven by 25 drivers and are an effort to provide a balanced, holistic engagement framework for HR leaders amidst these realities: 

The experience gap between leaders and frontline employees is widening:

There lies a 32% gap in engagement between senior leaders and frontline, increasing by 10 points Year-on-Year. It indicates a growing disconnect between senior executives and the rest of the staff. This may be because senior executives had to make many decisions top-down and quickly during the pandemic, without hearing the voices of people bottom-up. Effective leadership is about recognizing that employee-speak is the most valuable intelligence that an organization can harness to take informed and inclusive decisions and navigate change. 

Nearly half of the leaders are at risk of burnout, and this increases with higher designations:

Leaders must tune into employees and understand workforce experiences. Hence, the team that manages the employee experience and employee listening program plays a critical role in providing leaders with quick and easy insights. This will help them make informed, inclusive and holistic decisions beyond engagement towards a more balanced scorecard. 

Today we are asking more of the frontline managers than ever before:

Squeezed by competing leader expectations and employee expectations, managers feel pressure from above and below. For instance, increasing employee performance and productivity while the workforce seeks work-life balance. Anywhere between 50-70% of a team’s engagement can be attributed to the frontline manager. Hence, supporting and building the capabilities of front-line leaders should be a key priority. 

How can organizations address the EX concerns? 

Post the pandemic and Great Resignation, our leadership pipelines are filled with talent who are yet to build their managerial capabilities, along with existing ones who need to evolve and adapt their leadership styles. Josh Bersin, too, in his “HR Predictions for 2023 report”, states that every company will need to revisit its leadership model. Indeed, the Qualtrics 2023 Employee Experience Trends report suggests that investing in growth and leadership development drives engagement, inclusion, and retention, as is evident from the numbers below:

• Employees who agree they have good growth opportunities are 15% more likely to have high engagement
• Employees who believe their career goals are 8% more likely to experience high inclusion
• Employees who believe their career goals can be met are 7% more likely to intend to stay.

The answer, indeed, lies in human-centric leadership. HR shall help clarify the organizational expectations for leaders and outline what practical behaviours it translates to. It is about enabling leaders to be more self-aware, authentic, empathetic and adaptable. It involves providing support and training to mitigate the skills experience gaps and to empower employees to fit the purpose. 

To enable this, HR will need to support managers and leaders with more frequent data-driven insights so as to mitigate the risk of burnout, turnover etc. Such insights shall come only if organizations truly listen in during disruption. Listening is a key priority for engaging employees, and organizations must transform their listening strategy for the new world of work. Especially so, because employees can be engaged and still leave, be at risk of burnout, or feel like they don’t belong. 

From employee engagement to employee experience

Employee engagement is connected with 3X more revenue per employee, 40% lower turnover than the average company, and 15% higher productivity per employee.  But what truly drives this engagement is the daily interactions and touchpoints, and critical people outcomes. This is what encapsulates the Employee Experience (EX). Thus, organizations need to transform their EX strategy for the new era of work by driving a shift: 

• From measuring only engagement to measuring holistic experiences
• From point-in-time measurement to continuous and connected listening
• From benchmarks and descriptive stats to advanced analytics and prescriptive insights
• From Central and HR-driven methods to Manager-as-the-hero approach
• From lack of Action to a System-of-Action at all levels

This shift is possible when organizations have an active listening program and continuously measure and track manager and leader effectiveness within that program. Linking such foundational employee listening programs with 360-degree feedback and EX pulse surveys will help drive leadership development correctly. HR Leaders must ask the tough questions while deep diving into the leadership areas:  Are we building leadership capability from an inclusive perspective? Are we helping managers enliven their values?

Such questions will unleash the real need and real opportunity to accelerate leadership transformation and impact. We are at a critical juncture. As Diane Gherson, 2023, Senior Lecturer and Harvard Business School & Former CHRO, IBM, once shared, “This generation of HR leaders has been appointed by history to define the workplace of the post-industrial era”.