There’s a ‘perception gap’ between bosses and staff

The pandemic has seen people geographically separated from their colleagues and bosses.

In an effort to keep employees happy, many have invested in employee experience tools and HR technology.

One employee experience company, Benefex, has conducted a survey to find out what employees are missing in their workplaces. The company spoke to 213 HR professionals based around the world between May and June 2021, and the findings should concern employers.

Notably, employees are wanting a better experience, while bosses believe they have done enough.

Employee experience

It now seems that there is a ‘perception gap’ between bosses and employees.

Given that employee experience has been a major investment in multiple sectors, and has been noted as an area that will see continued investment, it is surprising that 51% of HR leaders still rate their employee experience as “excellent”.

On top of this 67% of HR leaders in the media and technology sector felt they gave staff an excellent experience.

While this sounds great, the fact that only 27% of those surveyed believe that employees would consider their experience “excellent” is troubling. Partly because of the low expectation and also because of the fact that HR leaders are acknowledging that there are issues with the services they provide yet paradoxically believe it to be excellent.

75% of HR leaders are noted they are struggling to meet the needs of the hybrid workforce.

Perhaps the most shocking finding is eight in ten HR leaders are providing a fragmented employee experience for their staff, unable to integrate all elements of employee experience within a single centralized technology platform.

Unifying expectation and reality

The factors that have been found to be damaging employee experience improvements are budget constraints (84%), difficulties measuring return on investment (79%), a lack of ownership around employee experience and wellbeing (69%), poor HR technologies and processes (62%).

Naturally, investment can improve these areas, but that requires a shift in attitude for the whole organization.

Changing attitudes within an organization can be difficult. When UNLEASH spoke to Nick Matthews, VP and general manager of Culture Amp, a company focused on employee experience and culture, he explained that companies need to assess what they want their culture to be and regularly get feedback from employees to help direct initiatives.

Matthews commented that when it comes to employees who are unhappy “there is a very high, [maybe] 70% chance that they will not be here” next year.

Employee experience is undoubtedly becoming prominent in the collective consciousness of companies. Nonetheless, avoiding burnout and keeping employees happy requires communication.

The need for communication and closing the ‘perception gap’ is punctuated by staff shortages that are being felt across industries and companies are struggling with employee retention.