An attitude of gratitude is the source of growth personally and in relationships with fellow employees. Gratitude nurtures common courtesy that’s central to diversity and inclusion. Ironically, when we appreciate differences, we’re more likely to discover commonalities. Employee experience gains from gratitude in interactions are smiles, responsiveness, and doing the whole job. These gains can be measured in productivity, engagement, succession, and tenure. Just as importantly, these gains are felt by everyone as a positive tone in your workplace, preventing dysfunction.
Embedding gratitude in your business strategy for employee experience will benefit your organization on every level, every day. Gains from gratitude in your employee experience strategy include:
- Aligned motivations to get everyone on the same page:
- Start out by discovering the “jobs-to-be-done” (JTBD) of employees at every level. This is NOT the same as job roles and responsibilities! JTBD are the ultimate outcomes a person seeks through their relationship with your brand.
- Find out employee’s intrinsic motivators: “Intrinsic” comes from within (values, purpose, capabilities, enjoyment, etc.), whereas “extrinsic” comes from the outside (praise, competition, power, punishment, rewards, etc.).
- Craft your surveys and engagement efforts in accordance with JTBD and intrinsic motivators.
- Rally employees around a central point to improve consistency, reliability, trust, relationship strength, and cross-organizational collaboration. Instead of rallying around money, emphasize customer well-being as the source of money, intrinsic rewards, jobs-t0-be-done, and organizational goals. This keeps the horse before the cart!
- Use ongoing stakeholder analysis to minimize roadblocks first, and to maximize rewards secondly, toward organizational goals.
- Start out by discovering the “jobs-to-be-done” (JTBD) of employees at every level. This is NOT the same as job roles and responsibilities! JTBD are the ultimate outcomes a person seeks through their relationship with your brand.
- Respect for interdependencies to minimize silos and dysfunction:
- Start out by sharing customer stories of gaps they experience. This emphasizes your enterprise’s purpose, and each job’s role in closing (and preventing!) gaps for customers as “the hand that feeds” salaries, budgets, and profits.
- Show employees at every level how their decisions and handoffs affect others. Who depends upon whom? What are the consequences of dropping the ball? This can be done in many ways, such as a “6 degrees of separation” exercise.
- Focus your EX Council and CX Council (steering committee or other governance) on resolving and preventing “execution silos” as a prerequisite to reducing “operational silos“.
- Expand your DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) team’s focus on silo prevention.
- Include mutual respect and silo prevention in personal and organizational reviews and rewards.
- Start out by sharing customer stories of gaps they experience. This emphasizes your enterprise’s purpose, and each job’s role in closing (and preventing!) gaps for customers as “the hand that feeds” salaries, budgets, and profits.
- Consistent follow-through on commitments:
- Start out by following up on previous commitments at the start of each meeting agenda. Emphasize the need to be transparent and proactive in communicating commitment progress.
- Show everyone how progress depends upon follow-through. This can be done through high visibility of Gantt charts, swim lane diagrams, and other charts that depict the consequences of dropping the ball.
- Reward follow-through on commitments to organizational goals according to intrinsic motivators, extrinsic motivators, and jobs-to-be-done.
- Start out by following up on previous commitments at the start of each meeting agenda. Emphasize the need to be transparent and proactive in communicating commitment progress.
These employee experience strategy elements shape Ease of Work.
What are your favorite ways to facilitate aligned motivations, mutual respect, and follow-through?
You can inject these gratitude benefits into your strategies for employee experience and customer experience by aiming for almost-automatic CX excellence. This is possible through resources at ClearAction.com.
- You can monitor your baseline performance and progress with our new CX Skills Maturity Assessment. It’s a free spreadsheet with 3 sections for organization-short evaluation, organization-deep evaluation, and individual evaluation. You can boost your skills maturity through ClearAction’s courses for executives, leaders, CX managers, and more.
- You can enrich your whole team’s skills in the areas listed above — and much more — by subscribing to the Experience Value Exchange. It’s a daily mentor for Marketing, CS, CS, EX, and PX teams to tap into 5-minute to 40-minute advice.
This article is second in a three-part series that began with Gratitude Grows Gains from Customer Experience Strategies, describing what shapes Ease of Doing Business.