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We are back with our Webinar Series - Employee Experience vs Retention during Challenging Times. It is a monthly webinar series where Jade Choy, Epoch’s CEO, has conversations with leaders and innovators in the Employee Experience and engagement space.
In case you missed it, here are some key learnings and takeaways from our webinar featuring Monique Jackson, Chief Diversity Officer at Gusto.
View the full recording here. Scroll on for notes!
Monique Jackson is the Chief Diversity Officer at Gusto, a people platform tech startup that supports small and medium businesses. She drives strategy and incremental change leveraging data and cross-functional partnerships throughout the company. In this role, she marries the depth of data with the power of the employee experience to create programs, process improvement, and impactful partnerships that ensure DEI is embedded into the entire employee life cycle in a scalable way.
Employee retention is a crucial aspect of any organization’s success. The employee lifecycle from attraction, engagement, progression, and development are all important to the employee experience. However, Monique emphasized the significance of progression and development in employee retention.
Monique spoke about the role of a strong foundation and individualized experiences to foster employee belonging. She emphasized the importance of having a benefits team, accounting team, finance team, and stakeholders, all brought in to fully implement initiatives. You have to find what's in it for these teams and translate it in a way where they can see the value for everyone to be on the same page.
Monique stressed the need for active awareness and analysis of events rather than passive participation. Monique states that is important to not box yourself into one idea and stay stuck on one single type of event just because it worked before. Rather, she recommends continuing to improve and innovate your initiatives when catering to the employee experience. Additionally, Monique likes to provide her employees with the same notebook, pen, stickers, and book bags to foster inclusivity and belonging.
Relationship building is critical; turning a working relationship into a friendship can be challenging. However, Monique ensures that when she first interacts with someone it is not about work, but about who they are as a person. This is effective in creating a strong foundation and removes the transactional feel that typically happens when they do start working together.
Monique utilizes data points and key metrics that are attrition predictors such as employees' intent to stay. Monique will watch how many people come to the event, and how long they will stay. She then sends a follow-up survey and challenges herself to use these metrics to improve the next event.
When it comes to objective key results (OKRs) Monique ensures her team’s OKRs align with the company’s. For example, if the goal is to be profitable, she knows that happy employees lead to diverse and profitable teams. Therefore Monique’s OKR would be increasing representation within the team by X percent. By doing this it will align into the overall goal of a profitable company.
Note: Once you set your OKRs, it is best practice to follow up and have check-in points to keep yourself accountable. Often, OKRs get swept under the rug after a few months.
Monique sets the stage early on, recognizing that Employee Experience is a crucial part of retention - but not the whole piece. If your focus is solely on solving retention issues, it can become a never-ending battle, leaving you feeling unsuccessful.
It is also important to stay connected to trends and maintain a positive outlook as you navigate in this space. Finding your “happy place” whether it's Disney, TV shows, yoga, and setting boundaries for yourself are essential to recharge.
She also recommends surrounding yourself with a community and discussing topics and events with them. This will prevent you from feeling isolated in your thoughts during stressful times
Use Epoch to plan your employee events and programs, then track analytics on how the events went! Epoch is an employee engagement platform used by people teams at Reddit, Asana, and more. Epoch supports any internal event that needs email, Slack announcements and reminders, calendaring, and reporting. On top of impactful engagement and feedback analytics, Epoch provides a simple way to communicate and promote events to your workforce, helping events reach employees where they prefer to receive messages.
Teams using Epoch have seen positive impacts in event engagement while reducing time spent managing and promoting events by over 70%. Udemy used Epoch to scale its inclusive culture, driving 89% participation, and Modus Create successfully scaled a global events program across 15 time zones.
Increase productivity and connection among employees through company culture with Epoch. Curious to learn more? Book a demo today!
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