Defining and maximizing performance through enhancing the employee experience.
The quality of your employee experience is the driving force behind the quality of your business outcomes. Higher employee engagement, through a positive employee experience, leads to a higher-performing workforce and ultimately a higher-performing business. There’s no need to overcomplicate the process of how to improve—embrace change, follow the science, and keep it simple.
At WSA, we empower business leaders to understand what’s important to their employees and to measure what matters. With the two foundational pillars of our approach—the art and the science—we gain an understanding of your organization’s unique elements to ensure you focus on improving what truly matters. By combining the art and the science we’re able to pinpoint worthwhile actions and ensure your leadership is motivated to take action, leading to better outcomes for everyone—your employees, your leaders, and your organization.
A poor employee experience creates a poor business. If employees feel they don’t belong, if they aren’t motivated by leaders, or if they are ill-equipped for the job at hand, they quickly become disengaged and lose their commitment at an alarming rate.
Business is personal—it’s as simple as that. We spend more time at work than doing just about anything else. Aside from our spouses, children, and families, work is the next most important aspect of our lives. Creating an environment where your employees are engaged leads to increased productivity, higher retention, a more positive culture, and ultimately higher investment in the organization. And with how much time is spent at work—truly understanding this employee experience—and the appropriate actions to maximize it—is the only way to lead effectively.
The key to developing a higher-performing workforce is understanding where your organization is and knowing the right levers to pull over time to make progress (actions). Gather insights through surveys, employee listening, and artificial intelligence. Then leverage your leaders—senior, business, and frontline—to ensure the critical components are measured, addressed, and working together to drive outcomes.
Identifying and action planning for what’s important rather than what’s simply interesting is exactly what we do.
Data and science are required to understand what actions are needed to maximize performance within your workforce. It all starts with engagement. If engagement is low, increasing engagement and the “care factor” of employees is the first priority. If engagement is high, it’s about refining the other aspects of the employee experience that enable us to continually move the needle. The only way to truly know where to start is to let data and science lead the way.
Employee engagement is truly the heart of the science of a high-performing workforce. Engagement provides a baseline of what folks care about at the organization, what motivates them to work harder, stay longer, and care more. When engagement is combined with equipping employees to do their job right and well, it creates a strong foundation for high performance. Defining how to “engage and equip” your workforce is the basis of the WSA engagement model that brings together the art and the science.
Defined as fostering equitable processes and practices at your organization. Research has shown that inherently there are unconscious biases and inequitable practices at play that enter into leadership decisions within almost every organization. The fact that these are unintentional — and the notion that they are likely not decisions being made consciously — leads to the importance of pinpointing where inequity may be happening and eliminating them so everyone reaps the benefit of working in an equitable workforce.
Employee lifecycle is a broad term that gets at all the processes in place to ensure that employees are equipped to do their job well and in the most efficient and effective way possible. Examples of employee lifecycle may include optimizing programs such as the candidate experience, onboarding, exiting, remote working, mental health, and well-being. Employee lifecycle can be ensuring that employees have the right tools, equipment, and training they need to be effective. It can also be ensuring that investments made towards employee benefit and recognition programs are optimized.
