As an HR leader, creating a great place to work by improving the employee experience is at the heart of everything we do. It keeps employees engaged, productive, and loyal. It boosts productivity and enhances customer relationships. Our role and responsibilities as HR leaders must also align strategically with executive goals, and support the growth of the business. One study found that companies that invest in their employee experience see double the revenues and are four times as profitable compared to their less engaged counterparts.

Yet Human Resources teams are often spread thin. Responsible for the entirety of the employee experience – recruiting and retaining the very best people, developing meaningful benefits and rewards programs, providing professional development, and managing day-to-day employee needs – our plates are full.

When you add in the new demands of an elastic (heavily favored to remote) workforce, along with highly managed budgets and teams, building an employee-centric culture and great place to work just got exponentially more difficult.

The Employee Engagement Solution: An HR Success Story

At Alchemer, the employee experience is at the core of everything we do. We constantly strive to improve our employee experience because we know that happy and engaged employees perform better and that translates into a better experience for our customers and company growth. Just like many other HR teams, we are challenged to deliver this experience while balancing our budget and resources.

To find a better way to free up our time to focus on what really matters – building and maintaining a world-class employee experience – we enlisted the help of our Alchemer Solutions team. By listening to our customers in similar situations while exploring solutions to our own challenges, the Alchemer Employee Experience Solution was born.

The Employee Experience Solution streamlines some of HR’s most time-intensive tasks, allowing you to focus on employees and not on processing daily tasks. With pre-configured and customizable surveys, it makes collecting employee feedback easier than ever. It also includes the Employee Request Portal, which centralizes and automates the process of managing everyday employee needs.

To learn how to build a better employee experience, watch the free webinar.

Providing a Better Experience – For Both Employees and HR Teams

By improving our ability to collect continuous feedback, the Employee Experience Solution has made us a more nimble organization. We can easily leverage insights to act quickly, making incremental changes that net big results in driving our employee experience. Centralizing and automating the employee request process has given us the time-savings to improve our HR department operations.

For example, during the pandemic, we deployed the Employee Connection Pulse to our team, who were all working from home. The results told us that Alchemer people wanted more ways to connect outside of work meetings. Within a week, we were setting up game nights and a book club for those who wanted to join. With the Employee Experience Solution, you can achieve many of the same benefits. This out-of-the-box solution lets your HR team focus on what matters most – building a culture that fosters aligned, engaged, and productive people. Let me explain how.

Honing Your Feedback Skills 

Feedback is the backbone of any employee experience initiative. Yet too many companies relegate data collection to a once-a-year exercise and wait too long to make any meaningful changes. In comparison, we designed the Employee Experience Solution to help you capture the voice of your employees through continuous, meaningful feedback. From employee engagement to manager assessments to exit interviews, you’ll have the customizable surveys, workflows, and reporting to measure and improve your listening strategies throughout the employee lifecycle. 

A Common Scenario. Using the Core Employee Engagement Assessment each quarter, you can uncover key engagement drivers and areas of improvement. For example, if employees provide feedback that your benefits are confusing, you can work to develop educational resources about your offerings. If they would like more corporate transparency, you can collaborate with senior management to improve communications.   

The Employee Pulse then lets you evaluate these efforts, asking targeted questions that measure your progress against your benchmarks. Informing your work with real-time insights, this hones your efforts to improve experience faster and more efficiently.  

Taking Back Your Time Spent on Day-to-Day Needs 

We understand how employee requests can add up. It’s all too easy to become inundated by emails, texts, and phone calls from employees asking for everyday changes. These one-off requests not only take time but lack the visibility and adequate tracking mechanisms needed to manage them properly.

We built the Employee Request Portal to specifically address these issues. From request to review to implementation, this centralized hub streamlines the entire process and eliminates confusion from employees on the correct process to follow. If an employee wants to request a name change after getting married, they simply open the Employee Request Portal and fill out the appropriate request. A customized workflow immediately routes the request to HR for review and approval. Once approved, a notification is sent to the employee, automatically closing the loop. All requests are consolidated within Alchemer’s platform and the data collected can integrate with the HR systems you already have in place. This facilitates better tracking and reporting so nothing falls through the cracks.  

Launch Your Improved Employee Experience in 30 Days

You work hard to create a great place to work and to improve your employees’ experience. The Employee Experience Solution works to improve yours. With more effective feedback cycles, streamlined processes, and automated workflows, the demands on your team are significantly reduced. At the same time, your employees enjoy an improved experience. This empowers your people to become active participants in the organization while allowing your team to take on mission-critical initiatives that can transform your culture and your business.

The Employee Experience Solution lets you accelerate the launch of your new processes as well. We include six hours of onboarding coaching from our Professional Services group, so you’ll be up and running with your people-focused efforts in as little as 30 days.

For more information on the Employee Experience Solution, click here. 

The post Deliver on the Promise of Creating a Great Place to Work appeared first on Alchemer.

When the market researchers at Sahler Research wanted to assess the changes in spending and behavior related to coronavirus, they saw China as a roadmap for consumer spending in the USA.

“China is at least several months ahead of the U.S. on its journey to more normalized consumer behavior,” said CEO Kelley Buechel. They contacted the Alchemer panels team to find one audience halfway around the world and another audience in the U.S. during a time when travel is difficult.

The White Glove Treatment

The Alchemer panels team is available to help customers find the right audiences to deliver results, especially when you need more in-depth screening conditions and custom-segmented quotas or international respondents. The Alchemer panels team has access to tens of millions of respondents in more than 80 countries, which can be accessed within minutes. They will work with you to ensure that you receive only your customized audience. They can deliver panels of just about any size around the world.

The panels team can help you reach very niche consumers, including business professionals from a multitude of industries. If you need to reach a B2B audience, the team can find it for you.

In addition, the panels team are also expert survey builders, so they can share best practices to maximize the quality of each response, so you get the results you need.

The Self-Service Option

For researchers wanting general targeting, without an in-depth screening, Alchemer offers a self-service Survey Audience solution. Survey Audience allows survey builders to find a new demographic or audience quickly and easily. Once a survey builder finishes their survey, they have the option to target panelists by selecting from more than 30 profiling attributes. These panelists always come from double-opt-in survey panels from well-known providers, rather than “river samples” from past surveys (respondents who have previously agreed to answer other surveys). This service is currently only available for North American audiences.

Pricing is based on the length of the survey and the number of respondents, and there are no additional charges for selecting any number of profiling attributes until the specified audience is defined. Profiling categories range from basic demographics to criteria including automotive preferences, media consumption, hobbies, interests, ethnicity, and education. This feature reduces the cost for survey creators to reach smaller groups.

Seeing Changes in Isolation Behavior

For larger, international research, such as the work Sahler Research is undertaking, working with the Alchemer panels team delivered the results they needed. The Alchemer team found audiences in China and the U.S. for Sahler so they could track consumer behavior on two continents.

“Our March data suggests that roughly 45% of respondents were very likely to visit a restaurant over the next month, which could suggest some pent-up demand,” noted Kelley Buechel. “Another positive, overall normalization showed signs of improvement with roughly 25% of Chinese consumers said their routine was already normalized as of late March, versus 20% in February.”

For more information about Sahler Research, visit https://www.sahlerresearch.com/

For more information about Alchemer panels, click here or call 1-800-609-6480.

The post Alchemer Panels Help Coronavirus Research Find New Audiences appeared first on Alchemer.

We recognize that businesses are working hard to rapidly adapt to a new, much more virtual way of working. Your people’s mental and physical well-being is front and center, and you’re likely in overdrive making sure employees have the tools and communication they need to continue to do what they do best.  

We are here to support you, which is why we are giving our customers free access to our new Employee Connection Pulse Survey.

This five-minute survey will help you quickly gain insight into how equipped and supported your employees feel to work productively in a virtual environment. The results also allow you to identify what actions you can take to further help them.

We developed this survey for our own people and are engaging with them weekly to better understand how we can make them feel more connected while working virtually.

For instructions on how to access this new survey template, please visit this user guide on templates. The Employee Connection Pulse template can be found in the “Employee” template category. Survey templates are available to all paid plans, including Collaborator, Professional, and Full Access plans.

If you would like to learn more about Alchemer Enterprise Solutions, please contact us at [email protected].

The post Stay Connected to Your Virtualized Workforce with this Free Employee Connection Pulse Survey appeared first on Alchemer.

With nearly 90 percent of organizations projected by Gartner to compete solely on the basis of experience by 2020, factors that negatively impact experience must remain a top business priority. Failure to do so or pushing experience improvements to the wayside puts an organization’s competitive advantage and market relevance at risk — no matter the industry.

In the context of the workplace, bullying can impact employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, and the overall experience of the organization. 

Defining workplace bullying

Exceptional employee and consumer experiences must remain among the top priorities for organizations because they are not only equally important for the organization’s competitiveness but also are dependent on each other. One experience cannot be truly successful without the success of the other.

One employee experience challenge that many organizations are facing is workplace bullying, creating toxic workplaces and causing employees to seek employment elsewhere. With talent shortages already a reality in many industries, combating any toxicity of in the culture makes good business sense.

Defined as the repeated pattern of disruptive behavior with a conscious or unconscious attempt to do harm, bullying must meet three criteria, says Renee Thompson, DNP, founder and CEO at the Healthy Workforce Institute:

1. There has to be a target
2. The behavior has to be harmful
3. The behavior has to be repeated over time

It is important, however, to decipher between true bullying and workplace incivility, says Dr. Thompson. 

Incivility, says Dr. Thompson, is low-level, condescending, and catty behavior, including eye rolling, giving preferential treatment to colleagues you like, withholding resources from colleagues you don’t like, rude gossiping, mocking, and the like.

“Distinguishing between the two is so critically important because if you can identify the behavior as bullying, that’s HR. You have policies about that, and it’s pretty clear how you handle that. But with incivility, that’s culture. There’s a much different approach to how you address culture,” says Dr. Thompson.

Whether a behavior falls into the definition of bullying or incivility, it is imperative to eradicate the behavior and fix any problems within the workplace culture and overall employee experience that it has created.

Letting it continue or falling back on the mentality of “this is the way it’s always been,” risks long-term business success, employee engagement, and consumer loyalty. 

The effects of workplace bullying

A staggering 60.4 million Americans are affected by workplace bullying, according to a 2017 Workplace Bullying Institute study. What’s even more surprising is that 61 percent of those surveyed in the same study are aware of abusive conduct in the workplace.

Put simply, workplace bullying can create a multitude of problems throughout the organization — impacting employees, consumers, and employers.

Effects of workplace bullying on the employees

Being bullied at work can have many effects on the victim, especially when the bullying consistently happens time and again. 

Those who are or have been bullied experience high levels of stress, anxiety, panic attacks, anger, trouble sleeping, inability to work or concentrate, lower self-esteem, higher blood pressure, ulcers, and more, according to Sherri Gordon, author and bullying prevention advocate.

Other employees who are not being targeted by the bully suffer effects as well, such as being more likely to receive a prescription for antidepressants, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills, researchers at the University of Helsinki Department of Public Health found.

Due to the many mental and physical side effects, it is extremely likely that a workforce affected by bullying and incivility will experience lower productivity across the organization and a worse customer experience, which will greatly affect the overall success of the organization — possibly for years to come.

Effects of workplace bullying on customers

When there is active bullying in the workplace, customers are prone to experience the effects of workplace bullying, more often in certain industries than in others. At the very least, if see or witness bullying occurring in real time, they may not return and spread the word to their friends and family. 

Additionally, customers may become targeted by the bully or even by a bullying victim. Pent up anger and anxiety may cause victims to take it out on customers or simply be unpleasant during the customer’s experience.

In an industry like healthcare, however, workplace bullying could actually put the patient’s life and health outcomes at risk. For example, when bullying is present among a group of nurses who are caring for the same patient, the patient may end up not receiving the level of care they need.

“The number one most common disruptive behavior in healthcare is yelling, criticizing, gossiping, cursing in patient care areas where patients can hear,” says Dr. Thompson. “A lot of times it happens in the patient’s room. Imagine the patient experience if you’re a patient and you hear employees badmouthing each other, arguing, fighting, cursing — sometimes even in your room.”

The healthcare industry is one extreme example of the effects of workplace bullying on consumers, but workplace bullying can rarely be kept completely away from consumers in any industry and could affect the customer experience in a number of ways.

Related: Providing excellent customer service with surveys

Effects of workplace bullying on the employer

Because of the negative effects bullying has on employees and customers, employers experience the many negative impacts on overall business success.

Productivity could decline up to 40 percent when workers are distracted by bullying, according to Robert Sutton, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University.

In addition to the decreased productivity, according to Gordon, many employers with workplace bullies experience:

• A heightened risk of legal action
• A hostile work environment 
• Increased employee absence
• Increased employee turnover
• Increased talent recruiting costs
• Loss of employee loyalty
• Tarnished brand reputation

All of these effects add up to one thing — a massive, negative impact to the organization’s bottom line.

Leveraging data to eliminate workplace bullying and improve company culture

In order to prioritize employee and customer experiences, organization’s must leverage data to consistently monitor and adjust the different journeys each experience. Surveys are an efficient and cost-effective way to gather, analyze, and leverage workforce data needed for impactful decision making.

By consistently monitoring and gauging employee and customer experiences through surveys, organizations are more likely to identify, assess, and respond to bullying instances. Consistently doing so provides data that can be leveraged in mitigation and prevention strategies. 

Three ways organizations can leverage surveys to collect workplace bullying data include:

1. Determining general sentiment about each stage of the employee experience: These surveys should be distributed on a consistent basis to every employee in the organization.
2. Uncovering and investigating reports of bullying: Organizations can use a constantly active survey to allow employees to report bullying 24/7, whether anonymously or by providing information regarding contacting them for further discussion.
3. Assessing leadership’s understanding of workplace bullying: Organizations can leverage surveys to assess the level of understanding managers, supervisors, and other executive leadership have of what workplace bullying is and how to address it.

In any industry at any company of any size, it is imperative to not only measure and analyze your overall employee experience but also protect employees from workplace bullying and civility for the sake of the employee’s and patient’s mental and physical health and as well as the organization’s bottom line.

About Renee Thompson, DNP
CEO and Founder of the Healthy Workforce Institute, Dr. Thompson is an international speaker, author, and consultant. With a master’s degree in Nursing Education (MSN) and a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), Dr. Thompson tackles the professional challenges facing healthcare leaders today. With 26 years as a clinical nurse, nurse educator, quality manager, and nurse executive, Dr. Thompson is an expert on workplace bullying and spends the majority of her time working with healthcare organizations that want to eliminate bullying and incivility.

The post How to detect and prevent workplace bullying appeared first on Alchemer.