How Can Improving Employee Efficiency Helps During Second COVID-19 Wave!

Today, all business organizations are struggling to optimize their digital operations and maximize their profits. In this major economic crisis, it's high time for businesses to think of some innovative ways to grow their revenue.

Usually, businesses are focused on improving customer experience, but in this work from home culture, they have to also concentrate on employee experience. That's because, during these unpredictable times, only your employees' support can help you out.

In this new normal, how to improve your employee experience and build an engaged organization, we will discuss that ahead. So, brace yourself to know how to survive this pandemic.

What is Employee Experience(EX)?

Employee experience is the combination of the events that happen in an employee's career cycle. The worker's experience starts from the day he or she applies for the job till the last working day.

This covers everything — how employees feel, learn and grow in your organization. Many organizations think paying well to their employees is enough to improve their experience. But that's wrong because it's more than a handsome paycheck.

Employees want to receive acknowledgment for the time and efforts they are putting into growing the organization. They want to contribute to their company's success and desire to receive something meaningful in return.

Why Invest in EX During the Second COVID-19 Wave?

Business leaders clearly understand the relationship between customer experience and revenue. It is common knowledge that satisfied customers are more likely to buy. Similarly, optimizing employee experience can lead to improved revenue. In fact, EX can, directly and indirectly, raise revenue.

Interestingly, EX has a direct impact on CX. When your employees are satisfied, they will put extra effort into satisfying customers. In simple words, when employees are engaged to do their best work, revenue and customer experience automatically go up. And that's what businesses need to beat the pandemic crisis.

7 Ways to Employee Experience in Remote Work Environment

According to Gallup, companies with highly engaged employees have 20% higher sales. Engaged workers are also more productive and present. That is why while developing TrackOlap remote work tracking software, we didn't only focus on how to boost employees' productivity. No, we also concentrated on how companies can offer a better experience to their employees with our tool.

Using our remote work tracking software, you can enhance your employee experience during the second COVID-19 wave by:

Improve Internal Communication

During a crisis, organizations tend to focus on external communication and put internal communication on the back burner. It is the biggest mistake because employees are the most important and equally ignored stakeholders in the organization.

Companies are so hung upon improving the external communication that they forget to communicate with their employees, who are direct stakeholders of their organizations. With effective communication, you can foster a sense of community and create a cohesive company culture. Further, good communication improves productivity and accountability among remote workers.

Thus, we have added a two-way communication system into our tracking software. Within a dashboard, managers can interact with an individual employee or the whole team. From the same portal, remote workers can communicate with seniors as well as their subordinates.

Additionally, the remote workforce will become aligned and transparent workflow can be sustained.

Understand your Employees and Listen to Them

Today, your employees are already dealing with so many uncertainties. So, don't leave them in the dark and try to better understand them.

You need to understand the new challenges that your employees are facing. To do so, you have to encourage your employees to speak up and share their thoughts. When your employees open up about their thoughts, you can better understand their mental state.

Now, personally calling every employee won't be a feasible solution. Therefore, you can customize a form on our software and create a basic questionnaire to understand your employees. Your employees can quickly fill the form within the tool and share it with you.

With this simple practice, you can give your employees an opportunity to share their thoughts with management. Similarly, management gets an opportunity to understand their employees during the crisis. It is a simple yet powerful solution to foster a good EX.

Provide Performance Reviews

Right now, your employees don't need sugar-coated words from you. They need meticulous performance reviews to help them improve their skills. In this digital landscape, employees need to know how they can advance their careers in spite of all odds.

During a crisis, your annual performance reviews aren't enough anymore. Remote employees want continuous feedback. They want monthly, weekly, or even daily performance reviews to improve their skills.

It sounds like a lot of work for the managers. Thankfully, our automatic performance reports can help you. The software automatically tracks your employees' progress throughout the day and compiles individual performance reports. You just have to share easy-to-read reports with the concerned employees and let them self-evaluate their shortcomings.

This strong performance management system is helpful for both the employees and employers. Employers can track their employees' performance and guide them to improve it. On the contrary, employees can gain the opportunity to learn new talent and enhance their skills.

Simplify Things for your Employees

Employee efficiency is directly related to comfort. If your not employees feel comfortable and satisfied with your company policies, they will be more effective. It is simple math.

Now, in the social distancing and work from home circumstances, your employees are already very uncomfortable. That means you have to take some immediate actions to create a comfortable working environment to sustain EX.

You don't have to do much to provide comfort to your remote workers; small changes are sufficient. For instance, you can change the leave management policy in your organization. Through our time tracking software, we let employees apply for leave and check its approved status within the app.

Applying for leave over a phone or computer isn't too big a change. But, when a person is busy looking after his or her sick family member, this small thing is a great help.

So, considering the pandemic situation, you should make some small yet significant changes in your company's policies to provide some comfort to your people.

Focus on Mental Health

Currently, people aren't dealing with one healthcare issue. No, they are dealing with social isolation, mental health, stress, anxiety, and personal finances like many other problems.

Mental health is the prominent issue that employees are vigorously struggling with right now. Therefore, a good employee engagement organization should focus on how to improve the mental health of their staff members.

On many levels, you can mentally support your employees, such as:

Encourage them to take frequent breaks so they won't exhaust themselves.
Keeping an eye on their productivity level to make sure that they are well. And, when you find the slightest drop in your employee's performance, immediately contact them and ask for a reason behind it.
Promote informal communication that lets employees freely share their thoughts.

Involvement in Reinforcement

Employee experience is highly triggered by a sense of belongingness. You should present a clear company's financial projections with your employees. And ask them to share ideas to armor their operations back to normal.

When you give responsibility to your employees to help the organization during the crisis, it will automatically initiate a sense of belongingness. Employees will feel that they are doing something meaningful to help their organization. And, that feeling will fuel up your team's confidence and productivity even more.

Importantly, when your employee does something to boost a company's sales, you should appreciate it. Your few words of appreciation will encourage them to put even more effort into growing the organization.

Flexible Remote Work Culture

Just allowing your employees to work from home won't automatically improve EX. You have to provide them with the flexibility to work from home. That is because when your employees are working from home, they also work for home alongside.

Suppose Mrs. Iyer (an employee at your firm) has a toddler son who sleeps in the afternoon, which gives her time to work. But, in the afternoon, you give lunch break to your remote employees so she can't work during her son's nap time. Similarly, your other employee, Mr. Prakash, has to take the medication with his lunch, and he needs a few minutes to nap after that.

At home, every employee has a different routine, so you should let them work under flexible hours. But, that doesn't mean you should let your employees slack. Using our attendance button, your employees can start and stop work anytime. This way, you can allow them to regulate their own working hours without affecting their work.

Conclusion

You know now how improving employee experience can help you during the pandemic. Plus, it's not even hard to create a good experience for your employees. Just understand them, work on their feedback and emotionally support your staff. That's a simple trick to make your employees happy.

TrackOlap time tracking software is precisely designed to help out both employees and employers during the crisis. We have developed a simple solution for small as well as big companies to grow. So, give us a call anytime and let us help you build EX in your organization.