This is a critical time for organizations to reevaluate their relationships with employees and ensure they are taking the right steps to modernize, reprioritize, and reimagine the employee experience. It’s good for your business, good for your people and, for fundamental human reasons, the right thing to do.
Why the urgency? The pandemic has been a game changer in redefining expectations from people throughout the workplace, including business leaders and employees.
Business leaders have discovered they can get great results when they treat each employee as an individual. Employees have proved they can be highly productive working from home—while also achieving a healthier balance between life and work. This is a win-win for any organization and its people.
But workplaces have also exhibited a potentially negative side, often stemming from blurred lines between home and work priorities. As a result, many workers experienced burnout working from home. In some cases, they attributed this to a lack of boundaries, flexibility, and empathy from employers.
These challenges have led to increased stress, lower morale, and growing job dissatisfaction. Some experts believe this has been one of the factors that precipitated an upheaval in the workforce that has been characterized as “The Great Resignation.”
The Great Resignation
The term was coined in May 2021, and since then, the trend of people quitting their jobs, particularly in the U.S., has continued to accelerate at an unprecedented pace. In 2021, more than 47 million U.S. workers quit their jobs, by far a new record according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This turbulence is ongoing. In March 2022, 4.5 million U.S. workers quit their jobs. Workers of all types, across all age groups are in the mix and younger workers are particularly focused on achieving a better work-life balance: 52% of Gen Z and Millennials are likely to consider changing employers in 2022, up 3% over the previous year, per Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index, titled Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work.
If you are in HR, a line-of-business manager, team leader or anyone else with an active role in hiring, training, managing or motivating workers, you know firsthand the value of delivering a great experience to employees. Job dissatisfaction and turnover are expensive, unproductive, demoralizing, and poisonous to building modern, people-centric corporate cultures.
People—particularly younger ones—are demanding better, more fulfilling work experiences, meaning flexibility in hours and location; employers that encourage learning, well-being, and personal development; and companies that value flexibility, trust, empathy and a reimagined life-work balance for all workers. These are no longer “soft” values or optional niceties. These are the characteristics that are shaping the future of work and are becoming table stakes for attracting, hiring, retaining and inspiring employees.
The People-Powered Workplace: Reimagine the Employee Experience
Read this paper to learn new ways to empower your employees and teams by creating a new kind of workplace—one that is centered around your employees and their experience.
Download NowTechnology to prioritize the employee experience
Technology has been an enabler of both the positive and negative aspects of this workplace transformation. On one hand, it allows more people than ever to work from home and be productive; on the other, it brings the workplace into the home in a way that can be intrusive and stifling.
If you are in HR, on the business side or in IT, now is the time to turn to technology tools designed specifically to empower workers to be successful, productive, and fulfilled in work-from-home and hybrid environments.
Foremost among these new tools is a new technology/business category called Employee Experience. The term is indicative of its mission: to help organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders—delivering employee-centric capabilities to empower people and teams to be their best wherever they are located.
The industry’s first comprehensive employee experience platform is Microsoft Viva. Microsoft Viva is powered by Microsoft 365 and experienced through Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Viva fosters a modular approach to employee experience, giving HR departments and business leaders enormous flexibility to tailor the work environment to their employees and cultures. It also gives employees similar flexibility to pursue their personal and professional goals while bringing a greater balance to their lives.
Modules are available in key areas, focused on making the hybrid era more productive and humane for employees. These are:
- Viva Connections to amplify culture and connections.
- Viva Insights to bring a balance to productivity and wellbeing.
- Viva Topics to harness knowledge and expertise.
- Viva Learning to accelerate skilling and growth.
A fifth module, Microsoft Viva Goals, will be generally available in the third quarter of 2022 and brings capabilities for objectives and key results into the portfolio.
Key takeaways
Reimagining the employee experience in an era of hybrid work is a matter of embracing modern attitudes bolstered by modern technologies. The concept of an employee experience platform is an answer for these times. The embodiment of that platform in Microsoft Viva gives decision-makers a chance to turn words into actions. You can change the employee experience for the better, and for good.
Are you ready to reimagine the employee experience? Please review the additional articles and resources on this site and visit Microsoft Viva for more information.
