Maya Angelou famously said: “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” This is an adage that I think most of us believe to be true – and how can you really argue? Can you recall how you felt when something special occurred with a friend or a loved one? How about that movie theatre attendant, or amusement park worker or drive through shift lead? In fact, I think we all form our opinions about an experience based on our own perceptions of that experience.
Leading employers know this to be true as do most of your favourite brands.
So, what’s the secret? Is it a perfected supply chain, the right PR, the luck of the right product placements & marketing?
Those things matter for sure, but they have always mattered. What hasn’t always mattered was if the employees enjoyed the brand as much as the customers.
Early in my UKG experience (back in the Kronos days to be clear) as a consultant I would pitch the employee centric features that were available. My success rate was 0% – some from famous brands that would surprise you today. The rationale was always that every employee could be replaced – there were always more fish in the sea.
Now is completely different – you could say the tides have turned. Employers are going the extra mile trying to consider every angle to ensure the employee experience is right and attractive to prospective employees.
Enter UKG Pro, WorkJam and all the employee-centric solutions they offer as partners through Simms & Associates.
Key elements offered between them can be bracketing into 2 areas: Enablement & Engagement.
- Granting employees full, or partial control over their schedules. Self-Scheduling or open shift selection tools keeps an employee focused and engaged on your work opportunities – especially from a part-timer’s perspective.
- Providing early wage access solutions not only eases their financial stress, but also makes your open shifts more attractive vs other options they may have.
- Self-management of their availability through availability change requests enables your pool of working parents, students, or seasonal employees delivers work/life balance with ease.
- Encouraging self–improvement though mobile learning so they can learn more to earn more. Learning paths with clear outcomes and opportunities will allow your workforce to grow with you and evolve their job into a career.
- Award top performers through leaderboards & incentives that can range from x number of weekends off a month, consecutive days off, to gift cards or special brag-swag.
- Directly engage and update their workforce through HR/HQ-oriented communications. Speak their language as well with in-line translations and an app provided in their native language.
- Raise the employee and subsequently the customer experience to the next level leveraging Operational Communications & Task Management ensuring a consistent store experience across the fleet through a workforce that knows how to get the job done.
Engaging means retaining (when done right). Enabling is doing more (consistently, nationally) with less as a net benefit.
Engaged and enabled employees get more done, and customers experience the difference. An upgraded customer experience is within reach!
Don’t shovel against the tide, contact us to learn the which, what & how leading brands get the experience right on a daily basis.