The importance of creating a personalized employee experience to improve retention and build loyalty.

When news of the COVID-19 pandemic first traveled around the world in 2020, the workplace reinvented itself nearly overnight. HR teams scrambled to adapt to the new realities of remote work. Burnout and mental health issues escalated as workers struggled with work-life balance. New tools, programs, and processes were needed — and many were quickly brought on.

After years of struggling with hybrid work and talent shortages, the highest-performing HR leaders are moving on — pivoting their strategies to meet new challenges and higher employee expectations.

In the face of so much change in the world, one thing remains constant: HR teams continue to focus on engaging and retaining talent. If the Great Resignation was to blame for retention worries in 2022, limited resources and an uncertain economic outlook might be the lead cause for those anxieties in 2023. 

The critical success factors for 2023 will be retaining the best employees and ensuring they are fully engaged in your company. This challenge is even more difficult than it was pre-pandemic. 40% of employees are planning to quit their jobs in the next 6 months and the majority of people quitting jobs are leaving their industry altogether. Many executives are led to believe the only tool is higher pay. However, higher wages are not the answer. A Pew Research Center study found that low pay wasn’t the primary reason employees quit –  it was culture. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that higher wages aren’t as effective at encouraging millennial and Gen X workers to take jobs as they were for baby boomers when that group was the same age. Interestingly, 71% of employees would take a pay cut for the right company culture. 

Toxic company culture has always been a challenge, but it has grown to become the number one reason employees are leaving1. “Our data clearly highlights that toxic company culture drives people to leave their jobs more than any other single factor,” Sara Sutton, Founder and CEO of FlexJobs, said in a news release. “Especially with many companies now transitioning to permanent hybrid workplaces, it’s critical that leaders emphasize building healthy cultures that are inclusive of all their workers’ needs and locations, whether they’re on-site or remote.”

Increasing pay isn’t necessarily going to attract employees or stop people from quitting. As the FlexJobs report shows, workers who aren’t getting what they want from employers are willing to walk away, even if they don’t have a better opportunity. 

Unfortunately, creating a positive company culture is not easy or straightforward. For decades, employers have been struggling to retain and engage staff. Companies have adopted 401k plans, added ping pong tables to the office, offered unlimited vacation and dozens more approaches to make employees want to stay. And yet, retention rates have only declined. No one has been able to crack the code of employee engagement through these kinds of generalized programs. 

The secret to a highly engaging culture lies in something that most companies are already doing, but for a different audience: personalization. Many companies are providing a personalized customer experience. The same approach and value applies to your employees. Each member of your organization has a unique personality, set of values, set of skills, passions, interests, and life outside of work. To remain competitive, companies must acknowledge the uniqueness of each employee and provide personalized engagement and retention solutions. Front-line managers must address each team member with an approach that is specific to that person; the whole person. This will sound absurd to many. It’s not. This is very similar to what many companies aspire for each customer: a personalized experience. This is what every person wants, whether an employee or a customer. 

Developing a personalized employee experience can be done. Whistle has broken down the employee experience, using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, into six levels of engagement, providing a tool to evaluate the various need states in your organization as well as specific programs to immediately improve engagement and retention by making it personal.