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During uncertain times, employees turn to the people they trust the most to have their backs: their managers.

And that's not surprising, because managers have a key role to play in helping their teams navigate situations (and especially challenging ones). Acting as a confidante to your employees can therefore go a long way in increasing employee engagement, as well as preventing turnover at a time when companies NEED to hold onto high performers more than ever.

In our recent survey, we’ve looked at the signs of lost trust in business and how it affects turnover. It's clear - 75% are more likely to leave a manager who aren’t open and honest, and 84% who feel their management team makes poor decisions are more likely to leave.

So let's focus on the areas you can control to increase employee engagement when it is starting to degrade. To help you manage challenging times, we’ve compiled a list of questions so you can play your part in tackling the issue of keeping your employees happy and preventing them from leaving (when you need them the most!):

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1. Are you creating an environment of trust?

Our research shows that trust is essential to employee wellbeing and engagement. And trust in the workplace can be divided into two categories;

1. An employee’s belief that their manager has their best interests at heart.

2. The ability for an employee to be truly honest, safe in the knowledge any risk they take won’t be used as retribution if things go wrong.

From baby boomers to gen Z, every generation of workers wants to feel heard and be an active participant of their company’s success. And that requires taking risks. But employees will only take risks if they know it’s safe for them to do so.

This is where the manager’s role is critical. A manager who fosters an environment where all ideas can be discussed openly allows employees to share their views and suggestions. It creates an atmosphere of psychological safety, which increases the trust between employee and manager, and where innovation and creativity can flow naturally. Want to learn how to build a culture of fearless feedback? Then this webinar of for you.

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2. Do you offer high job satisfaction?    

Employees with low job satisfaction are 88% more likely to leave their current place of work. This staggering number comes with another worrying sign: employees who feel they don’t have fun at work are 75% more likely to leave too. Over the past three years, workers have also reflected on the meaningfulness of their work and whether their current role aligns with their potential and interests.  

There's many factors that decides if employees are satisfied with their job or not. The managers have a challenge on their hands. If they manage to create a fun environment regardless of external circumstances there's a much higher chance of retaining employees. We've written a complete guide about how you can increase job satisfaction among each generation, but here's a few examples of what can be done:

- Create healthy competition among employees to keep them focused on a bigger goal

- Build a culture of recognition and celebrating wins in a public manner

- Invite employees to submit fun ideas to pursue

- Host unusual activities the team will appreciate

3. Do your employees find their work meaningful?

Meaningfulness at work varies from one person to another. While our research shows that there is a consensus among employees that being treated fairly and doing work that makes a difference is essential, there is also a huge disconnect between employees’ values and the impact they think they can have on their business. In fact,  less than 3 in 10 employees feel fully connected to their company’s purpose.

This is a serious issue, as lack of meaningfulness impacts all generations’ decision to leave a company. From Baby Boomers believing that the company is not making investments that will make the lives of future generations better, through to Gen Z feeling that the business does not take enough ethics and social responsibility, poor meaningfulness leads to turnover across all generations.

This shows a lack of alignment between employees and managers. As a manager, you can address it by:

- Including questions about meaningfulness and purpose during your 1:1s with each member of your team

- Articulating the company’s purpose to your team, ensuring you communicate it in a way that aligns with each person’s values

- Work with each team member to ensure they are given opportunities to work on meaningful work

Would you like to get practical advice on how to make make work more meaningful for your team, read this blog post.

Let's summarise! Keeping employees during changing times is a challenging job. But keeping them engaged shouldn’t be. ‍

To learn more about ways you can increase employee engagement and prevent turnover, download our Fighting Turnover report. You can also find more specific information by reading our guides - How to regain organisational trust or How to increase job satisfaction.‍

Trust is a business’ primary currency. Let us explain why.

1. Investors need it to ensure they are spending their money on the right companies.

2. Clients need to know they are in safe hands to spend their budget.

3. Employees need to hear their leadership has their backs if they are to execute on their company’s vision.

Trust is, therefore, so much more than a nice-to-have; it's a non-negotiable necessity. Whether you're a small startup, a multinational corporation, a government agency, or a non-profit organisation, the ability to build and regain organisational trust is paramount to your long-term success.

Trust is what makes a entire organisation go round. So, what happens when an organisation fails to deliver on the promise? Here's the seven most common challenges organisation with low trust are experiencing.

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1. Higher retention and loyalty

‍According to our study, Fighting Turnover, the biggest reason why an employee tends to leave is low trust. In other words, employees who trust their organisation are more likely to be loyal and committed, leading to higher retention rates. Trustworthy organisations are also more likely to attract and retain top talent, as employees seek to work in environments where they feel valued, respected and supported.

87% are more likely to leave a manager who doesn't keep promises.

2. Better employee engagement

Trust is a foundation for employee engagement. When employees trust their leaders, colleagues, and the organisation as a whole, they are more likely to feel committed, motivated, and engaged in their work. Simply said, trust fosters a positive work environment where employees feel supported, respected, and valued, leading to increased engagement and productivity.
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3. Increased innovation and creativity

‍Trust creates an environment where innovation and creativity can flourish. When employees trust their ideas and suggestions will be valued and considered, they are more likely to share their innovative and creative insights without fear of judgement or repercussions. Trust fosters a culture of openness, experimentation, and learning, which can lead to increased innovation, collaboration and creativity in the organisation.
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4. Better organisational reputation

Organisations known for their trustworthiness and integrity are more likely to be respected and admired by employees, customers, and other stakeholders. A positive reputation for trust can enhance an organisation's brand image, attract customers, investors, and partners, and contribute to long-term organisational success.
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5. Reduced conflict and miscommunication

When employees trust each other, they are more likely to communicate openly, honestly, and transparently, which can help prevent misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and conflicts. Trust fosters a positive communication environment where issues and concerns can be addressed proactively and resolved more effectively.
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6. Increased agility and autonomy

In a world that moves as quickly as ours forces us to act fast and be agile. In a trusting environment, employees feel empowered to take calculated risks, make decisions, and adapt to changing circumstances without fear of blame or reprisal. This promotes a culture of agility, where employees are more willing to embrace change, innovate, and adapt to new situations, leading to increased organisational agility and resilience.
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7. Higher performance

All the factors we’ve mentioned above combine to send performance soaring. When your employees feel trusted they perform better, they’re more productive, they have more energy and better morale. It's a win win. Your employees feel happy and valued, and your organisation’s performance goes through the roof.
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To help you learn more about the real impact each of these dimensions on organisational trust, and how you can address them as a manager or business leader, we have developed the guide How to regain organisational trust.

If you would like to learn more about ways you can address a drop in organisational trust early, contact us.

You know disengagement is bad for your people, culture, and business – but do you know how bad? And can you explain this clearly to senior stakeholders so they understand the need to prioritise engagement? If you’re not 100% confident here, this is the article for you. Keep reading and we’ll run through the true costs of disengagement, and what you can do to solve it for your organisation. 

If you’re currently building a case for pitching an engagement tool, you can use this bullet-proof workbook that will land you a “YAY” instead of a “nay”.

Employee engagement – a global challenge

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report finds that 23% of employees globally are engaged at work (and that's a record high!). And obviously there're differences across countries; South Asia has 33% and the highest engagement in the world, while most countries in Europe are ranked as low engagement countries with only 14%.

This isn’t even a post-pandemic issue. Global engagement has been terrible for years – this is the norm, not the exception. The harsh reality is the majority of workers worldwide are counting down days to Friday, only happy to see their pay check.

And this is probably the same for your employees. Even though you’ve got an amazing purpose, awesome employer brand, yoga classes and offer free lunches. These engagement stats have business leaders everywhere worried. But perhaps not worried enough. Let’s talk about what disengagement might be costing you.
  

Breaking down the costs

Overall low engagement costs the global economy $7.8 trillion, but let's break down the costs.

 
1. Increased absenteeism  

There’s plenty of proof that high disengagement increases absenteeism dramatically (Gallup say by 81%). And that’s an expensive problem that can appear in the following costs:

·     Highover time costs

·     Expensive temps to cover

·     Admin costs to manage absence

·     Reduced team productivity

·     Safety and quality issues (inadequate training; overburdened staff; fatigue)

·     Declining team morale and engagement

Overall, estimates suggest unscheduled absenteeism costs $3600 annually for each hourly worker and $2660 annually for each salaried employee.

Let’s do some simple maths…
500 employees = $1.3M in wasted spend annually(!!).

2. Lower productivity

Disengagement affects both individual productivity and team productivity too. According to Gallup, the amount equals to your annual performance targets slashed by 18%. Imagine if it was the other way around - we bet you’d be super happy if it was +18%! 

Disengagement is also linked to managers and the impact on direct reports. If you’ve an engaged manager, you’re 59% more likely to be engaged yourself.  

A great manager creates happy, high-performing teams – and a disengaged manager can quickly ruin engagement and productivity. (That’s why developing managers to deliver is something we at Winningtemp offers.)

3. Increased turnover

Now, let’s talk about turnover. Gallup’s research shows that disengagement increases turnover by 18% for high-turnover organisations and 43% for low-turnover organisations. Even at the lower end, that’s a major cost.

In other words, this cost estimates turnover costs at 1.5x to 2x an employee’s annual salary, depending on seniority and length of tenure.  

But there’s hope. Winningtemp customers on average enjoy 30% decreased turnover after one year. Using the example figures above, that could represent a saving of $900,000 to $1.3M. And if you're curious to see why employees decide to leave in the first place, the report Fighting Turnover: What matters the most to employees in 2023 is for you. Without giving too much of a spoiler alert, trust is key.

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4. Increased recruitment costs

Disengagement also spirals into long-term cultural issues, which damage your employer brand and could increase recruitment costs. In 2022, 3 in 4 employers struggled to find the talent they needed. These shortages mean it’s becoming more expensive and time-consuming to hire.

Let’s play with numbers.

LinkedIn research finds that companies with a poor employer brand have a 46% higher cost-per-hire than companies with a good employer brand, and the cost to hire an employee can be 3x to 4x the position’s salary.

Taking our average $40,000, that would mean you’re spending upwards of $120,000 for every hire. With a 46% uplift, that’s an additional $55,200 per hire. Know think of how many people you normally you hire a year.  

5. Declining customer lifetime value

But the consequences of disengagement don’t only affect your employees – it also affects your customers. Less productive, unorganised teams are normally serving delayed deliveries, including low quality and errors.

And what cost does that translate to? Well, poor customer service is expensive. And if you were to lose a customer, acquiring a new customer is 5x more expensive than retaining a current customer. Having an engaged, happy workforce of employees is better.
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So what does disengagement cost YOU?

By now, you’ve hopefully got a good sense of the scale of the engagement issue and opportunity. But when you’re building your business case, it’s more compelling to translate benchmarks, estimates, and averages into hard numbers for your organisation.

Use our disengagement calculator now to get started. Then chat to us, when you realise what a no-brainer Winningtemp is 😉

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The initial wave of resignations post-pandemic might have declined, but we’re not completely safe yet. Because 32% of European employees are actively looking for a new job. And by 2030 there will be a global talent shortage of more than 85 million people (that equals $8.5 trillion in unrealised annual revenue!).

So, employees are leaving in huge numbers, and hiring replacements is getting harder and more expensive. In this context, reducing turnover is a massive competitive advantage and your job is to understand what's causing the turnover. We've got a pretty good idea. We analysed our own data over the last months and noticed a few main reasons to why employees quit.

Even if you might have a good idea to why your employees quit, you need to know the exact factors that influence your people. Here's quiz you can use if you think the main reason is due to flexible working, financial wellbeing or poor diversity and inclusions. You can also download all questions straight here.

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1. Flexible working

The movement towards flexible working had been on the agenda for a while but the pandemic poured petrol on the fire. Now, 37% of European workers say they’d decline a job unless flexible working was offered. And 69% said they’d take a pay cut to have flexible hours. In the US, recent data shows 72% of workers prefer a flexible work model over returning to office full-time.

Employers are racing to meet these needs, to develop a workplace that works for everyone. McKinsey report that 58% of workers in the US – equivalent to 92 million people – have the option to work from home at least sometimes, for instance.

On the whole, this is good news. But there’s no perfect roadmap and organisations often face unexpected challenges.

Getting flexible working right can be like walking a tightrope. Employees’ scores for autonomy and job satisfaction often increase when they’re free to work flexibly, for example, but team spirit and participation might suffer. (Discover the nine major factors contributing to employee engagement).

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Could your approach to flexible working be causing turnover?  

If you answer ‘no’ or ‘not sure’ to 5 or more of the questions below, this could be an important area to explore.

1. Do you have a formal flexible working policy?

2. Is everyone familiar with your policy?

3. What do your people like and dislike about your policy?

4. Do your people know who to approach with flexible working concerns?

5. What challenges do your people face with flexible working?

6. Have you formally trained managers to manage remote or hybrid teams?

7. Are your social and networking opportunities inclusive for remote workers?

8. How does your onboarding accommodate hybrid or remote workers?

9. What challenges do remote workers versus office-based workers face?

10. Is hybrid working causing any tension within your culture?

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2. Financial wellbeing  

Recession in Europe is getting increasingly probable, as inflation spirals and energy costs run out of control. The US might not be far off. Official recession or not, this financial insecurity is hitting employees hard. For example, PwC’s Employee Financial Wellness Survey 2022 reports that 56% of employees are stressed about their finances. Over a third (34%) say financial stress is hurting their mental health, while 18% and 15% say money worries impact their productivity and attendance respectively.

Not good.

Poor financial wellbeing is a major contributor to poor engagement – and ultimately, a major cause of turnover. In fact, 65% of employees looking for a new job cite money as their primary reason.

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Could poor financial wellbeing be causing turnover?  

If you answer ‘no’ or ‘not sure’ to 5 or more of the questions below, this could be an important area to explore.

11. Are your people worried about money?

12. What are your people’s financial challenges?

13. Do your people have access to financial education and support?

14. Do your people feel well-compensated?

15. Do your people feel they can raise their financial concerns?

16. Is there pay equity between new hires and established hires?

17. Is there gender pay equity? (A new study shows probably not…)

18. Does your organisation have a recession/inflation strategy?

19. How do your people feel about your recession/inflation strategy?  

20. Do your people feel you have handled any layoffs as well as possible?  

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3. Diversity and inclusion

DE&I advocate is one of the three most-hired roles in HR right now, showing that HR leaders do appreciate the importance of getting diversity and inclusion right.

But there’s still a long way to go. Your stance — and more important, your actions – to further diversity and inclusion goals are a major driver of turnover. As much, if not more, than they ever were. For example, employees feeling they can truly be themselves is extremely important when choosing a new role for 66% of employees. This was a major factor driving turnover: employees who do look for a new job over the next 12 months are 11% less likely to feel they can be themselves at work.

To guard against turnover, a big question HR leaders should be asking is this: does your organisation truly accommodate and celebrate difference? Our Head of HR Sara Holmberg joined the podcast SheCanCode to talk about just this - How HR Tech can be used to promote DE&I within organisations.

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Could growing D&I concerns be causing turnover?  

If you answer ‘no’ or ‘not sure’ to 5 or more of the questions below, this could be an important area to explore.

21. Do you provide support for employees with long COVID?

22. Do employees feel safe at work, including those with clinical vulnerability?

23. How are different employees vulnerable in different ways?

24. How do you accommodate vulnerable employees at work and socially?

25. What challenges do different employee groups face?

26. Do you support different employee groups with the challenges they face?

27. Do your people trust they can raise concerns and be heard?  

28. Do your people trust you’re protecting their wellbeing?

29. Do all employees have equal career opportunities?

30. Do employees feel represented at senior leadership level?

Download the questions in a PDF here.

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The right insights drive the right actions

A million factors can drive turnover, and your own situation can be vastly different from another organisation. The right workforce strategies hinge on the right workforce data.

"Ultimately there’s no substitute for knowing exactly which challenges your own people face, in your own organisation and culture, right now. Unless you ask. Real-time insights and feedback from your employees really empower meaningful change. Here’s 8 tips of how to build a culture of feedback in 2023."

Winningtemp’s employee engagement platform could really help. Our platform gives you real-time scores for the temperature of your workforce, so you can spot issues as they emerge (and before they turn into turnover…). And more than that, Winningtemp provides automated, science-backed, field-tested guidance to address issues.

Winningtemp customers have enjoyed huge success reducing turnover because our platform makes it easy to act on the stuff that’s driving your people away and create experiences employees love.

Watch this two-minute demo video to learn more.‍‍‍

The right employee engagement platform helps you understand how your employees feel about work and take practical steps to make their experiences more positive. When you get this right, you enjoy much lower turnover, stress, and burnout, and much more job satisfaction, productivity and engagement. You create a culture that unlocks everyone’s best.  

But all this depends on you choosing the right employee engagement tool – and there are plenty of options. Keeping reading for the 14 priorities we think are most urgent.

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1. Pulse format

Annual surveys have profound limitations. They take too long, both for employees to answer and for you to analyse. They’re so sporadic and infrequent that they don’t empower employees to talk about, or HR to understand, the day-to-day things that really matter. It becomes nearly impossible to identify true underlying issues.

The upshot is, annual surveys aren’t an effective way to drive change, from the perspective of both the business and your people. Pulse surveys are a much stronger alternative, sending short bursts of regular questions across the workforce all year long.

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2. Quantitative and qualitative insights  

Most survey solutions deliver either quantitative or qualitative employee insights. The problem is, both methods have limitations that hurt effectiveness:

• The mainstay of traditional surveys, qualitative data offers depth. But this depth comes at a price: it demands impossible HR muscle to analyse.

• Quantitative data offers the opposite. It’s much easier and faster to analyse. But it lacks the depth to illuminate nuanced issues.  

The answer is an employee engagement platform that accommodates both. Winningtemp achieves this through our conversation portal, which encourages employees to give qualitative context to their quantitative survey feedback and chat directly with their manager. Anonymously.

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3. Guaranteed anonymity  

Employee surveys are valuable when they uncover deep insights about your people’s experiences at work. But those insights hinge on employees being willing to share deep insights. Anonymity is the price of this honesty. Anonymity is crucial and in our product you can always trust that no one can see how you answered the temperature questions.

Did you know that Winningtemp also is ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certified? This means that your data is safe, and that we comply with rigorous best practice standards (developed by the best and brightest information security experts) to protect your information and keep your data private 🎉

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4. Strong scientific credentials  

Employee engagement has long had a reputation for being ‘fluffy’. That couldn’t (or shouldn’t!) be further from the truth. Success is a science – and performance can be reverse-engineered.

The employee engagement platform you choose should take this science as its foundation so you can trust its output. Or risk surveys becoming a vanity project. Winningtemp’s survey methodology, for instance, is based on more than 600 international research studies. Learn more in this guide.

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5. AI-assisted questions

The engagement questions you ask should be validated by scientists – but they can’t be ‘set and forget’. Organisations are in a constant state of transition. If your question set is static, it’s as unagile as annual surveys.

Rather, a great employee engagement platform should use AI to optimise how questions rotate depending on employees’ responses. For example, to unearth more detail about a recent response and gather follow-up data to show trends over time. This means question sets are automated but personalised: employees get different questions at different times, to suit their situation.

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6. Smart workforce segmentation

A great engagement platform should empower you to send custom surveys to different parts of your workforce – like millennials, for example, or new hires. Nuanced segmentation like this allows you to uncover trends and tackle issues within different demographics.

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7. Real-time visual results

Better engagement data is still just data. To build engagement across the business, the right platform should pull data into compelling visual dashboards, in real-time. Dashboards should also be personalised to different stakeholders, so employees, managers and HR all see info that’s relevant and useful to them.

A great employee engagement platform should make deep, complex analysis feel simple.

Winningtemp, for example, analyses data constantly to show you real-time temperature scores against several categories (that according to science, matter the most for employee engagement). Our platform has a host of features to make data meaningful, like automatic temperature analysis, heatmaps, eNPS analysis, and trend analysis. Plus managers don’t just get data—they get easy-to-understand Insights, split into Strengths, Improvements, and Predictions.

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8. Benchmarking

The platform you choose should facilitate easy benchmarking. Internally, you should be able to quickly compare results between different locations, departments, and subdivisions. That way, you can understand unique strengths and challenges, provide extra support, and scale bright spots by empowering teams to learn from one another.

Externally, you should be able to see at a glance how your temperature scores stack up to other industries. What does an Autonomy score of 5.5 really mean? The answer could be radically different depending on your peers’ scores.

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9. Emphasis on action

Gathering data is only the first phase of effective employee experience management. By itself, gathering data doesn’t achieve anything. Rather, it’s all about what you do with your data.

That’s where the right employee engagement software really comes into its own. Using Winningtemp, for instance, managers can quickly create Actions (based on suggestions or adding their own) to address challenges in their team, and the system automates the workflow. A great platform makes it easy for managers and leaders to act on your engagement data, with intelligent suggestions and automated workflows.

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10. Employee recognition

Peer-to-peer recognition is integral to strengthening workplace bonds, building team spirit, and creating a culture where everyone feels valued. (That's why why Deloitte finds that employee engagement, productivity, and performance are 14% higher in organisations with a culture of recognition — driving a 2% increase in margins.)

Look for a platform that makes peer-to-peer praise simple, so employees can instantly send positive messages to colleagues.  

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11. User-centric design

Your platform has to be used to be useful. Low adoption is a major barrier to success – and your people won’t thank you for another tool that complicates their day. The right software must be intuitive and streamlined for employees.

Global pharmaceutical leader Bayer have a 90% employee participation rate with Winningtemp, for instance, thanks to our super engaging interface (including our popular emoji scale) and mobile app option.  

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12. Employee empowerment

Investing into employee engagement software isn’t just about gathering feedback. If it were, a basic standalone survey tool would suffice. But it doesn’t – because “employee listening” isn’t the point. The point is empowerment.

As Harvard Business Review put it, “empowered employees are more likely to be powerful, confident individuals, who are committed to meaningful goals and demonstrate initiative and creativity to achieve them.”

Self-leadership is a crucial prong of empowerment, giving your people the autonomy to enact change. With Winningtemp, employees are much more involved than just sharing feedback. Each employee also has a dashboard with a constant stream of insights and science-backed guidance to encourage individual ownership for change.

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13. Supports better one-to-ones

1:1s are a major mechanism underpinning the manager-report relationship. Great 1:1s foster great relationships, improve productivity and boost engagement.

But 1:1s often don’t fulfil their potential. They’re often seen as a time-consuming burden; more of a checklist activity than a true value driver. Look for employee engagement software that makes 1:1s better for both sides, to unleash the potential of this largely-untapped management tool.

For example, Winningtemp offers structured templates for both sides to prepare, full digital documentation with verification on both sides, and follow-ups to track effectiveness.

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14. A fantastic customer list and proven ROI

This list so far adds up to one thing: an employee engagement platform that delivers true impact. The right provider will have a thriving list of happy customers enjoying fantastic results. Like ours.

On average, organisations who've been using Winningtemp for more than one year have:

• Lowered employee turnover

• Reduced negative workplace stress

• Boosted workplace satisfaction

• Increased job satisfaction

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Are you currently building a business case for purchasing an employee engagement tool, this template could really help. Or if you'd like to learn how Winningtemp could boost your organisations' wellbeing and productivity: book a demo today.‍‍

Most HR leaders care deeply about developing better managers who uplift, nurture, and coach their teams. But often managers are adrift in a sea of responsibility, with little support and less bandwidth to empower better leadership.

Poor management is a major driver for disengagement, poor performance, and turnover. Our latest report "Fighting Turnover" shows just that, 75% are more likely to leave a manager who aren’t open and honest.

Upskilling managers must therefore be a major priority—but unless it’s simple and fast for managers to do the right things, nothing will change. Let’s unpick that, and explore a simple, fast way to empower better managers.

Are your leaders a turnover machine or loyalty lever?

In ‘The science behind effective organisations’ we analysed more than 600 research studies to understand what makes great businesses tick. We learned that effective leadership at individual, team, and organisational level is one of the nine critical factors influencing employee engagement.

These findings won’t surprise you. It makes sense that managers have an enormous impact on employee engagement, because managers are the primary lens through which your people experience work. Great days rarely happen without great managers.

The upshot is, managers have long roots. And like roots, they can either strengthen and support your organisation’s growth, or they can creep outwards, creating stress and fractures.

Heaps of research backs this up. For example, one study finds that a 1% increase in effective leadership drives a 53.6% increase in organisational performance.

"A 1% increase in effective leadership drives a 53.6% increase in organisational performance."
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Impact of Leadership on Organisational Performance.

But these ideas are hardly revolutionary. For years business and HR leaders have recognised the truth of this and worked hard to improve the standard of leadership across the organisation. The problem is, progress hasn’t followed suit.

Why does manager development fall short?

According to most studies building strong leadership is a major priority for HR leaders for 2023. The fact this is still an important focus area proves we haven’t nailed leadership development yet: but why?

At Winningtemp we work with many HR teams with oversight over hundreds of people leaders across their organisations. From what we’ve seen, it’s very often an issue of theory versus practice.

When organisations want to improve their managers, they often focus on training and upskilling. That’s great. But without also focussing on empowering managers to behave differently, training is only theoretical. It does little to change your people’s daily experiences with their manager.

Likewise, organisations often don’t initiate the right processes or accountability to incentivise different behaviour. If managers’ performance is measured in the same ways, why would they change? And if you can’t track how they’re performing, how will you know if this change happens?

We’ve talked before about how progress depends on engagement becoming your new cultural reality. Your managers are an essential part of that process—but change won’t happen just by enrolling them into training and forgetting about it. Rather, you must equip them with the right practical tools to turn learning into better daily leadership.

Do your managers have the right tools to lead effectively?

Let’s first define what we mean by effective leadership. Looking back to ‘The science behind effective organisations‘, a couple of ideas leapt out. First, we found that the leader-member exchange (LMX) model plays an essential role in determining leaders’ impact on performance and motivation. This LMX model is a relationship-based leadership approach that focusses on a two-way dynamic characterised by trust, loyalty, and respect.

Our analyses also found that supportive leaders who proactively coach employees have the greatest impact on reducing sick leave (did you know there's 7 questions that can prevent your team from burnout?). In summary: great manager relationships are trust-based, respectful, supportive, two-way and based on coaching. Relationships like this guard against absenteeism and build commitment, loyalty, engagement, and performance.

Now– how do you take that beyond theory into practice? It starts from understanding the practicalities of your managers’ day-to-day roles. In our experience, most managers want to manage well. But they’re also busy, stressed, and juggling a million plates. And often they don’t know how best to handle different situations in their team, especially given today’s endless disruption.

What managers need to be better managers, is a tool that makes it easy and fast to consistently do the right things for their team. That makes it easy and fast to build a two-way, trust-based, supportive relationship. That’s where the right employee experience platform comes in.

Empowering manager development

An AI-powered employee experience platform sends weekly personalised pulse surveys to your people, giving managers constant (and always anonymous) insights into what’s going on for their team. It goes way beyond telling managers what’s wrong, rather it helps them to proactively lead their team.

“Our goal was to provide managers with a tool to continuously measure and understand how their people are doing. This has helped management act more quickly", said Avega Group about Winningtemp.

Empowering more valuable 1:1s, making it easy for managers to record issues, goals, and progress is also key. With Winningtemp, managers and employees can invite each another to meetings so rather than being top-down, the whole process becomes two-way. It gives every employee a voice and makes it easy for managers to listen.

Winningtemp also creates accountability and visibility over your whole manager ecosystem, to encourage and track progress as your managers become better people leaders. Production Supervisor Christer Snäll agrees by saying “By collecting questions and feedback from the group and talking about them, I’ve been able to grow as a leader”.

Sounds good? Watch our two-minute demo video to learn more about Winningtemp.‍

Apple. Tesla. Comcast. Berkshire Hathaway. Alibaba. Johnson & Johnson. Visa. P&G.

That’s a handful of global leaders by market cap in different industries. And here’s the multi-million pound question: what’s the secret to their success?

Lots of things, for sure. But they all have one big truth in common: a strong leadership team consisting of the CEO (of course!), senior VPs and big Cs, as well as a strong executive-level HR presence.

Whether it’s a VP of People, a Head of Global HR, a Chief People Officer, or something similar, each of these successful companies positions HR at the pinnacle of the business. In the most cases, HR has had a seat at the table for years. So, let’s talk about why everyone else is scrabbling to catch up — and why you can’t afford not to pay attention.

People leaders are the guardian of organisational success

The pandemic made organisations more aware of their people. Or more accurately, more aware of how painful their people problems can become if they’re not managed effectively. With employee engagement hitting crisis mode on just 14% in Europe , absenteeism and burnout on the up, stress levels sky-rocketing plus all the impact of organisational change thrown into the mix, few organisations came out unscathed. And as many organisations are realising, this is only the start.

Whatever workplace model you’re exploring, people’s expectations and relationship with work have changed. The Great Resignation has left many organisations desperately spinning plates, scrabbling for talent while trying to keep the best people firmly in-house, while competitors’ salary budgets seem to get bigger and bigger.

The gap between the boardroom and the workforce has widened, and there’s a whole heap of dissatisfaction that’ll bear rotten fruit. Not prioritising to improve employee engagement will cost you (transform your unique disengagement cost here).

The truth is, organisations always have lots of priorities to juggle —but few companies aren’t battling people problems. And unfortunately, those without effective HR leadership at the top aren’t positioned to solve them.

How to elevate and empower your people leaders

Strengthening your HR leadership isn’t as simple as creating a Chief People Officer position. Unless you also empower that person with the right budget, processes, tools, and autonomy, you’re throwing them into the deep end without a snorkel.

Before the organisation decides to elevate HR to executive-level, you need to evaluate:

• Current people team capabilities and shortfalls
• People goals and how they relate to strategic goals
• Your biggest people challenges and roadblocks to progress
• Leadership team support for elevating HR
• Operational challenges to elevating HR
• The resources this elevated HR function will need to succeed
• The processes needed to integrate HR into exec-level

Creating space for HR to take more responsibility, accountability, and authority within the business means empowering the people you already trust with your biggest asset — your workforce — to make the difference you hired them for.

When you speak to your current HR team, you’ll likely find they already have a good idea on how to solve but are disempowered to do so. But there's probably also a few challenges in the hiding, that only the right people data can put to light.

See how the right tool can transform your HR processes, help prioritising the true issues and boost employee engagement here.

If you’re on the road to swapping out or supplementing lengthy annual employee engagement surveys for snappy and regular pulse surveys, you’re in great company! Opening feedback channels that enable year-round communication between employees and leadership is increasingly expected by a modern workforce.  

And the business benefits of feeling continuously heard at work are, unsurprisingly, huge. In a global study by The Workforce Institute it was found that:

“Highly engaged employees are three times more likely to say they feel heard at their workplace (92%) than highly disengaged employees (just 30%).”  

Now the task is to set up an employee engagement pulse survey that your employees love to engage with! Here are a few of the best practices recommended by our internal experts at Winningtemp.

1. Be selective about the number of questions you ask (keep it brief!)

For an employee engagement pulse survey, which is sent out on a regular basis as opposed to quarterly or yearly, it’s important to think about what provides the best experience for employees — paired with the need to collect the best and most relevant data (at the right points in time as well).

You need to aim to keep your response rate high across the year, while collecting as much data as you can.  

Miroslavan Valan, PhD, our AI/Machine Learning expert in our data science team at Winningtemp, says: “When we look at our data and consider quality, quantity, and timing, we see the sweet spot is to ask 4-7 questions, weekly."

When the threshold of 7 questions passed, we can see the effects of survey fatigue start to set in — in the form of response rates going down several percentage points.

Johan Weilenmann, Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Winningtemp, recommends using 6 questions or less in each survey, as “it makes for a better experience for the user — it’s more comfortable and easier. You should be able to complete it from your phone, on-the-go.”  

Should you want to test to see what works for you organisation, start with 6. It’s easier to go down from 6 than to start with 4 and go up. 

2. Have the survey sent out on a regular, recurring basis  

It’s important to help your organisation get into a rhythm answering these pulse surveys. Here you might be wondering what the frequency should be — whether to send once a week, every other week, or once per month? It’s a valid question because you don’t want to overburden neither employees providing the feedback — nor your HR teams and managers who need to act on the data.

Here it’s important to consider what type of platform you’re using to send out the surveys, and how the data is then presented to you. If it’s an automated send-out and automated analysis, then you don't need to factor this in to nearly the same extent. Instead, you can focus on choosing the frequency that will give you the most amount of relevant data while keeping users engaged. As Miroslav mentioned, sending out a smaller number of questions on a weekly basis can be a good formula for achieving this.  

There are other benefits associated with sending your (shorter) employee engagement pulse survey weekly, too. As Louise Ekelund, CSM, points out, “receiving the pulse survey each week helps make it more of a routine. It becomes a natural part of your week to answer these kinds of questions about your wellbeing at work and within your team. This way as an employee, these topics stay top of mind, and you feel included in the discussions around them.”

Weekly feedback also allows you to notice the micro-triggers of engagement or disengagement. Louise says: “A lot can happen in two weeks. From the employee perspective, it can be comforting to know they will have an opportunity each week where they can anonymously ask for help or give feedback.”  

For some organisations, monthly will be preferable. In this case, it’s recommended to increase the number of questions you ask to gather more data points at one time.

3. Choose the number of response options relative to the data you would like to collect  

Employee engagement pulse surveys tend to take the form of a “Likert” scale, which look something like this:

1 = strongly agree
2 = agree
3 = neither agree nor disagree
4 = disagree
5 = strongly disagree

What is the ideal number of response options to provide? Drawing from the findings of a study by Simms et al. (2019), the advice is to stay above 3 options. Question scales that performed poorly were those with 2 and 3 options; stabilise occurred at four increments. 4 or above is more likely to help you capture a given phenomenon. There was no significant difference, however, when comparing 7+ response options to fewer. More options did not make the data more accurate.  

So, we are left with the difference between 4- and 5-point scales. Which is considered best practice for an employee engagement pulse survey?  

The science is subtle on this point, having found pros and cons for each. From an engagement perspective, the sticking point of the 5-point scale is the “neutral” middle option. In a study by Kulas and Stachowski (2013), it was seen that reasons for choosing the middle option were:  

(a) the answer reflects a moderate or neutral attitude to the phenomenon being measured (which is the ideal)
(b) the respondent has difficulty deciding how he or she regards the question
(c) the respondent is confused about the meaning of the question
(d) the respondent feels that his or her answer is context dependent (“neither”)

If you are going to provide a middle option, which would be yellow on a red to green scale, you will likely see a lot of yellow because of what’s called a “central tendency bias” (Nadler et al., 2015) or “survey satisficing” (Krosnick, 1991). Want to read more about our emoji scale, here you go.

Here it’s helpful to think about what it will be like to interpret the survey results. Here Johan observes: “When you aggregate the data, it gives you a better picture, rather than if you see a lot of yellow and you don’t know what to do. You will start asking yourself, ‘do we have to work on this or not?’”  

The survey questions measuring employee engagement are inherent to every employee’s experience of work and are designed to solicit their unique perspectives. By choosing between “disagree” or “agree,” Johan says: “You are being asked to articulate an opinion one way or another. Are you dissatisfied with the way things are and want to see a change — or are you feeling okay to continue with the current conditions?”
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The opinions and perspectives of your employees are highly valuable. By structuring your employee engagement pulse survey according to some of these best practices, you can help your employees be heard in a way they appreciate and in a way that easily tips into measurable actions and improvements.  

Watch how Winningtemp’s science-based survey engine does all the heavy lifting for you.

Suhail Mirza is a life coach, senior advisor, and an expert in workforce wellness. In a recent Lunch & Learn with Cecilia Holmblad at Winningtemp, Suhail highlighted concerning new statistics about the pandemic's impact on our wellbeing and what we could do to reverse this negative trend.

How are your people feeling and how are they managing the effects of the pandemic? Find out which statistics you need to be aware of and what you can do to turn these negative trends around.

Depression rates have increased by 28% during the pandemic

 According to a Meta-study by The Lancet where 204 countries answered, depression has increased by 28% during the past 18 months. The pandemic took a huge toll on our wellbeing.

So how can you shape wellbeing within your organisation? One solution is to openly talk about mental health. The only way to really know how your co-workers are feeling is to ask them and let them know that they are free to honestly express their feelings. Their workplace should be a safe place, where they can be open about their mental health.

In addition, consider your company policies. What impact do they have on your people? Are they positive and employee-centric? HR teams need to be aware of company policies, including any changes made to them, and incorporate them into strategies for bolstering employee wellbeing. 

‍60% of 18–34-year-olds have been negatively affected by the pandemic

60% of the millennial workforce has been negatively affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Reasons might include loneliness, low engagement when working from home, or burnout from working too much.

There’s no simple solution to turn this trend around. But if you allow them to have a voice, and act on their feedback, you have a solid grounding to start from. Conduct pulse surveys and one-on-ones more often. Act fast on the feedback that they are giving you. By doing this, you not only demonstrate that you’re listening, but you also show that their opinions are important and valid. This way your young employees will feel more valued, which translates directly into greater engagement and productivity.

16 million people are considering leaving their jobs in the next 6 months in UK

What can you do to make sure your top talents stay at your company? You need to focus a little less on attracting talent and put more effort into retention. It doesn’t matter if you recruit top-tier talent if they want to leave soon after they arrive. If they are met with a toxic culture, they will leave your company eventually. 

The solution lies within how you’re shaping your company culture. It’s key to create a culture of trust and wellbeing, where people feel seen, heard and part of something larger than themselves. Above salary and benefits, it’s culture that separates companies when it comes to staff retention. It’s worth it to put in the effort to make your culture great, as this will motivate everyone not just to stay, but to be engaged too. 

£48 billion pounds — the shocking cost for employers who stand to lose staff 

If you don’t take care of your employees, the consequences will show up in your company’s bottom line. Not only is there a huge cost for each incident of staff turnover, but unhappy employees are unproductive, and negativity can spread throughout your teams.

The cost of the above statistic is staggering: if as many employees leave as say they plan to, the cost to UK employers would be around £48 billion pounds. Take care of your employees, and they will take care of your company.

54% of employees are on the brink of burnout 

Since the pandemic began, the line between work and free time has become blurred. We work more than ever. Most people do it because they feel under pressure to do so. It is this kind of negative stress that tends to grow within us enabling burnout to creep even closer.

The solution? Let your employees know that your company understands the importance of rest and recovery. Research shows that employees who take regular breaks during the workday become more productive and are at lower risk from negative stress. As a leader, you need to set an example. Talk about your weekend activities. Be the first one to take a lunch break. Only then will your employees understand that it is okay to hit the pause button, increasing their productivity so they can perform at their best.

Do you want to know more about how you can strengthen wellbeing in your company?

Get insights and advice on how to best serve your employees, read more about Winningtemp’s expert recommendations here.
Watch the full Lunch & Learn webinar with Suhail here.

A recent survey of our customers’ most pressing problems revealed some interesting yet unsurprising insights — most HR professionals believe that gathering better data around their employees’ wellbeing should be the top priority. 

That doesn’t mean human emotions, needs, and fears are reduced to mere data points; on the contrary, it means that organisations are willing to listen. They want to know how their people are faring, what their concerns are, and make data-driven business decisions to support the growth and wellbeing of their workforce.

“Employee expectations are changing, and we will need to define productivity much more broadly — inclusive of collaboration, learning, and wellbeing to drive career advancement for every worker, including frontline and knowledge workers, as well as for new graduates and those who are in the workforce today. All this needs to be done with flexibility in when, where, and how people work.”

Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft.

Extracted from The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work—Are We Ready?

Regardless of size or function, organisations worldwide are trying to bring back a sense of normalcy after a year and a half of uncertainty and disruptions. It's high time to start collecting real-time data to understand how your employees are coping with the big transition and how it affects their outlook when it comes to work situations, the company’s purpose, vision, and values. 

And, not just any data. Data that reflects your own organisation; that will help you shape, fortify, and continually optimise your HR people strategy. Data that helps you cut through the smokescreen of what you think employees need and focus on what they actually see as necessary.

And to not only measure and assess but to bring about real change. To show your employees that you listen and care.

For greater visibility and impact

Job characteristics (81%) and work environment (53%) are the biggest reasons for voluntary turnover.‍

Source

HR must be the eyes and ears of the business — you are assigned the monumental task of inspiring and activating the workforce, ensuring the culture and processes meet their emotional and psychosocial requirements, and at the same time, demonstrating the correlation between engaged employees and profitability.

You are in a unique position to drive business transformation with management buy-in if you can show hard data to support your strategy. Not only will it help you promote cross-organisational transparency, but it will also help spell out how HR initiatives connect to the overall financial business objectives.

Quantifying the qualitative values

76% of company value is attributed to employees.‍

Source‍

There’s a shift in the wind. The soft values that were previously deemed too soft to measure or tie to revenue are now being quantified, thanks to the digitalisation and advancement in HR tech. The qualitative values that were good to have before are a must-have now, with companies altering their entire people and HR strategy to focus on the needs and concerns of the workforce and to guide them instead of managing their time and output.

It’s not only managing the human resources that matters; it’s also how humane your employee experience is.

As the torchbearer of company culture and values, you need a systematic process for executing, scaling, and measuring the impact of your HR people strategy.

‍Data gives you direction

A long term HR people strategy gives everyone a collective vision and the steps to reach that vision, one milestone at a time. But it's still important to pay attention to what's directly in front of your feet. You need the power of real-time data to identify the issues that need immediate attention to ensure red flags don't become a part of your culture.

For instance, let’s take a look at the following long term goals:

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‍1. Goal: To reduce employee turnover.

Break down that goal into doable, actionable pieces by taking a data-driven approach to figure out how many people are quitting, where the highest turnover risk is, why they are leaving, and how to prevent it. Typically, leaders need to work with HR to determine the triggers, which can be several factors including career growth, compensation, lack of personal development, tenure, disengagement, unclear communication, or a sense of futility.

Timely data can shine a light on hidden grievances or an elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. Tools that use cognitive technologies such as machine learning can analyse millions of data points to even identify at-risk employee groups and suggest immediate measures. Winningtemp’s Smart Prediction is one such example. Armed with relevant data, you can adapt your short term strategy to focus efforts on the right things, which ultimately helps you shape the long term strategy.

2. Goal: Boost employee wellbeing.

Wellbeing is usually (and rightfully so) on the top of the agenda when it comes to HR initiatives. However, it’s a subjective topic, as what constitutes wellbeing for a particular group or individuals isn’t necessarily the same for the others. So how do you know for sure what wellbeing means to your people? The answer is simple - gather data.

As an actionable short term goal, start by providing your employees with a safe, anonymous way to voice their concerns, thoughts, and ideas. Actively listen and follow up with them without jeopardising their anonymity, especially after organisation-wide policy changes. Their feedback and the overall sentiment data should inform your long term strategy and values.

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Finding the focus of your HR people strategy

People strategy translates the organisation’s business objectives, vision, and mission into actionable HR initiatives and programs to set the plan in motion.

As Sara Holmberg, Head of HR at Winningtemp explains, “Start by asking yourself: Where are we as a company? Where are we going? Your HR people strategy must be in sync with the company vision, mission, values, desired behaviour, and the overall business strategy."

This clarity of vision will help you cut through the noise and concentrate on the right things.

One of the key factors that help set the direction for your strategy is the phase of the company — the maturity of the company determines the organisational structure, budget, business objectives, and with that, the HR focus.

A few example scenarios about how HR focus areas can differ according to overarching business objectives:‍

As the organisation evolves, so does your HR people strategy. However, there’s one factor that remains constant throughout the evolution — nurturing a positive and inclusive employee experience.

As Rahat Joshi, People Scientist at Winningtemp describes it so aptly,

“Employee experience is the heart of the HR people strategy.”

“To me, literally every aspect of one’s work life adds up to their employee experience — starting from their day-to-day interactions with the leaders to a sense of pride they feel while talking about their employer”.

The lion’s share of the responsibility falls on HR to engineer the process and ensure that the core of people strategy remains constant - to build a purpose-driven employee experience.

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Adding AI and people analytics to the mix

57% of those using AI in HR are looking to improve their employee experience.

Source‍

According to Gartner, “AI-based solutions can drive faster, easy-to-use HR services and help HR functions develop new personalization strategies to engage the technology-enabled workforce and improve employee performance”.

However, in an episode of the McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey partner Bryan Hancock points out that the vast majority of organisations are still doing “basic reporting-type analytics” instead of really digging into the available data:

“The question is, how many companies are going beyond that basic reporting, basic analytics, to using some of the bigger data sets, to using advanced computing power, and combining those data sets with well-proven academic theory on what really drives performance in an organization? How many organizations are using that at the next frontier? Very, very few.”

Are there tools that can help you access these data sets? Sure, but how do you know what to measure? And even if you’ve collected the required data, how do you utilise it to actually make a difference?
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You need to measure what matters. And that’s exactly what people analytics helps you do.‍

People analytics is a combination of quantitative data and qualitative insights that allows you to not only collect but also use the data.

A wide variety of HR tools provide you with GDPR complaint employee data that requires a certain level of experience and analytical skills to understand, act, and create a sustainable framework to measure the KPIs continuously.

However, you need the qualitative insights to answer the ‘why’ — why your employees feel the way they do. This data helps you dress the KPIs with substance, identify the engagement drivers, and utilise the employee feedback to optimise your strategy and make informed decisions.

People analytics helps you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to attracting the right people, taking inventory of and managing skills gaps, determining culture fit, and working with issues that impact employees’ engagement. It gives you access to a treasure trove of crucial insights to explore untapped opportunities, to find out why your people leave, and, more importantly, why they decide to stay.

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According to CIPD, a people analytics strategy should have three aims:

• Connect people data with business data to inform business leaders and help them make decisions.
• Enable HR leaders to use insights from analytics to design and implement appropriate HR activities.
• Measure HR’s effectiveness in delivering against its objectives.

Experienced People teams scan the entire employee lifecycle to gather and study relevant metrics to find opportunities, identify champions, and work actively towards providing a positive employee experience. There are multiple KPIs to measure and optimise your HR people strategy - starting from garden-variety HR performance metrics to calculating ROI against each employee.

However, if you’re in the initial stage of developing and testing your HR people strategy, you might want to start with measuring the following people analytics metrics to analyse and improve your employee experience:

Wrapping it up‍

If the recent employee exodus has taught us something, it’s that employees are asking for a drastic change — a change from dated policies and rigid conventions that hold them back instead of allowing them to thrive. And you need to be armed with the right gear to listen and bring about the long-awaited change.

Gathering enough employee data shouldn’t be the end goal; you must work with the available data to understand where your employee sentiment is heading, and how you can help them reach their full potential. That’s where people analytics play a huge role in elevating your HR people strategy — to prepare for the future of work and to build a culture that strives for excellence but also encourages empathy and understanding.