Victoria Dew, an expert in employee communication and engagement, returned to the Transform Your Workplace podcast to discuss the findings in her latest report, The New Rules of Employee Experience and Communications in 2022. Read on to learn what the surveyed organizations had to say about the changes, challenges, and growth that they experienced over the past year and what that means for the future of their business.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Victoria Dew is the Founder and CEO of Dewpoint Communications and a certified Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP). With 15 years of internal communications experience advising executives across various industries, Victoria is passionate about helping organizations improve their efforts to communicate and engage with their employees.
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NEW REPORT: EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND COMMUNICATIONS
Victoria Dew’s latest report The New Rules of Employee Experience and Communications in 2022 reveals the undeniable effects of an unprecedented pandemic on the workplace. Compared with their reports from previous years, Victoria and her team expanded their reach in conducting their research. Victoria explained that “the organizations we spoke to touch the lives of nearly a half-million American workers and nearly a million employees around the globe.”
They wanted to talk to leaders and organizations of all kinds, all sizes, all industries, and all sectors, and they sought to “make sure there was something [in the report] that anyone from any size organization or industry could find, apply, and use right away to help improve employee experience and communications.”
A lot has changed over the past two years, so the research team doubled the number of leaders surveyed, and made sure to have a significant representation of frontline employees. Victoria added, “we wanted to take a snapshot of where we are now — looking at best practices for hybrid, rural, and remote work. We also wanted to analyze some of those initial changes around how leaders communicate, how we keep people connected in their digital environment, and how organizations and leaders planned to evolve as they move forward.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
“The way we’ve always done it”
“A lot of the report obviously focuses on the Great Resignation. You saw the ‘quit numbers’ this week: 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November, which was up from 4.2 million in October, which we already thought was high. And we see that the number of available jobs vastly outstrips known people who are looking for jobs. I think that the way that we’ve always done it — the way that workers have always been kept on the back burner, always treated as semi-disposable — I do believe it has fundamentally shifted.”
A constantly-changing workplace
“At the end of the 2020 report, one of the questions I asked was, ‘what if the hits just keep coming?’ And as we’ve seen with the Omicron variant, and certainly what we saw over the summer with Delta, is this idea that every time we think we’ve got our arms around how to do this, it changes. […] I don’t think that the need to rapidly shift gears, update, refine, and adapt is going to change anytime soon. I think the slowest pace of change is in the past.”
Letting go of the past
“We still haven’t figured out that there’s an alternative to face-to-face. We are all still trying to figure out face-to-face and what to do in the absence of that. We haven’t actually tried to figure out how to make hybrid work. […] This is the time for innovation and adaptation, and the rule book has been thrown out. So we get to recreate, reimagine, reinvent, so many aspects of the way we create employee experience and the way we communicate and connect with our people.”
The silver bullet of employee experience
“All aspects of employee experience and communications are becoming more nuanced. We are having to use finer and finer brush strokes. You know, this age of top-down, one size fits all — the thought of that is really gone, right? Now, we’re dealing with micro communications and listening and more two-way communication and really engaging audiences in a way that is exciting. So I think the silver bullet is actually embracing the chaos and complexity.”
Listening is key
“When I asked about the voice of the employee, people wanted less talking and more listening, but then also taking action. We’ve talked about survey fatigue — people don’t get survey fatigue. They get tired of being asked for their opinion and then nothing happens.”
Keeping good people
“You cannot wait for people to walk out the door to understand that you have a problem.
It’s a lot harder once the ship is leaking. One of the shifts when it comes to retention is being proactive and strategic because there are so many ancillary benefits to it. So beyond retention, it’s performance, it’s innovation, it’s growth and development. And it’s helping people to stay and move laterally through the company and take on different roles and creating that connection and culture. Getting ahead of it is the most strategic, smartest way to run a business.”
LEARN MORE
Victoria Dew’s new guide report, The New Rules of Employee Experience and Communications in 2022, is packed full of great information, much of which wasn’t covered in this episode. Download the report here.