EasyVista SA

05/10/2022 | News release | Distributed by Public on 05/10/2022 09:12

Why Caring About Employees is Good for the Bottom Line (& 3 Tips to Show Employees You Care with ITSM)

Bob Rizzo | May 10, 2022

Why Caring About Employees is Good for the Bottom Line (& 3 Tips to Show Employees You Care with ITSM)

Share our post

Let's get right to it: Employee satisfaction is the key to customer satisfaction.

Despite this fundamental truth, businesses are facing growing difficulty retaining and satisfying employees because of "The Great Resignation" of 2022. In fact, according to a recent survey, 44% of employees across all businesses and industries are "job seekers," according to Willis Towers Watson's 2022 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey.

If you're facing difficulty improving employee satisfaction because your employees are on the move, don't panic. We have a few tips to help empower your employees so that they can, in turn, create memorable customer experiences.

Why is Employee Satisfaction Important?

As we mentioned earlier, employee satisfaction directly correlates to customer satisfaction.

In fact, a recent survey from Harvard looked at the relationship between employee ratings from Glassdoor and found a relationship between customer ratings, stating "We found that each one-star improvement in a company's Glassdoor rating corresponds to a 1.3 point out of 100 improvement in customer satisfaction scores - a statistically significant impact, which was more than twice as large in industries where employees interact closely and frequently with customers."

But, that's not the only reason to consider improving the employee experience. Improved employee experience also:

  • Contributes to higher rates of employee retention:Keeping employees happy helps keep them growing with your organization. With nearly 900,000 jobs in the U.S. (according the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) and a projected growth of 9% by 2025, IT service desk jobs are competitive and highly coveted. But, the pool of individuals who are qualified for these positions may be shrinking - creating a hiring nightmare for some. When you flip this and empower employees you can more easily retain them.
  • Encourages loyal employees to refer others in their talent networkto apply to join the team:When your team loves their role and are empowered with the right support and tools, they will share this with their friends and former colleagues. That can lead to a greater likelihood that they will refer a friend for a job, creating a satisfying environment for all.
  • Improves employee mental health: Mental health matters. Although not all mental health struggles are caused by workplace stress, it can certainly contribute to worsening problems with anxiety and depression. When you truly care about improving the employee experience and provide the right tools to handle the job while reducing stress, you may begin to see an improvement in the overall mental health of your team. Of course, this takes a multi-level approach, but prioritizing your employees is the first step in helping them improve their mental health.

For the greater business, or even for the C-level executive, these benefits amount to one thing: lower costs. By reducing employee turnover and having access to top talent, you'll save costs. By creating positive customer experiences through happy employees, you'll increase customer retention, which increases revenue.

Ways to Measure Employee Satisfaction

Employee satisfaction seems like an abstract concept - especially considering that what satisfies one person might not satisfy the next to the same capacity.

The first method is to create channels and avenues for employees to provide their honest, anonymous feedback. This can be through something as simple as a form or can be as complex as answering a survey through a chatbot.

Additional metrics to observe include:

  • Technician Job Satisfaction:How satisfied are the service desk agents in their roles? This is crucial to measure because it directly correlates to whether employees will be absent from work often, turnover rates, and how efficiently they are able to perform their job.
  • Customer Satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is actually relatively new in regard to the service desk. This might look like a survey at the end of each interaction, using Net Promoter Score, or Customer Effort Score to calculate satisfaction. Whichever method you go with, you must be consistent.

These two metrics can help you realize the relationship between employees and customers in your specific business so that you can better improve the overall experience.

3 Tips to Show Employees You Care

Now that we've discussed the benefits of employee satisfaction and the ways to measure it, let's discuss a few tips to help make happy employees a reality in your business.

1. Pay Attention to the Tools at Work


The tools you use in your business should be as simple and as seamless for your employees to use as the applications they use in their personal lives. Unfortunately, that's falling short for a lot of people. In a recent survey,22% of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the applications and software provided by their workplace.

Figuring out which tools are working and are making employees' lives easier is the first step in identifying the gaps. At the service desk and IT department level, this might mean looking at whether yourITSM tooland self-service solutions are empowering your team and enabling them to provide the most value.

Additionally, the tools your employees use indirectly matter as well. If they are not equipped with the right tools to process the data they are continually collecting and are unable to usetheir data for predictive measures, they may be facing deeper frustration. Tools that can help them leverage the power of automation and AI to essentially see the future and plan better are critical.

2. Share Knowledge and Eliminate Silos

Whether working in IT, HR, Facilities, Marketing, or Customer Service, there is one complaint across the board from employees: Siloed departments and gatekeepers combined with a lack of uniform processes can make knowledge creation, sharing, and access difficult. You have to find a way to cut through the red tape and bureaucracy to empower employees to find the information that they need to do their jobs well. In turn, this will also reduce onboarding time.

Beyond that, the knowledge needs to be easily digestible and accessible. This is especially important when you have employees who telework or work remotely part of the time. You can do this through a chatbot or virtual agent.

Read some of our top tips on how to empower your employees with information in this infographic.

3. Predict Their Needs

It's a running joke for many relationships: Things would be perfect if only you could read someone's mind and predict what they'll need.

It sounds like a joke, but what if you could predict not only what your employees need, but when they will need extra help?

That's the idea behind AIOps, which helps predict unplanned downtime so that you can always make sure your team has what they need to succeed. When you can see an IT weather forecast that runs 10-15 hours into the future, you can improve the employee experience by not only reducing the unplanned downtime and responding to it quickly, but by making plans that help them navigate when the system will fail.

In the end, these efforts serve to keep everyone up and running and to get your IT home in time for dinner - and who doesn't love that?

Conclusion

If there's one thing to glean from this post, it's that getting your employee experience to level up starts in the IT department. Creating simplified, streamlined solutions to empower them to do their job will energize your team to serve their customers well.

To learn how to create a better employee experience, check out our eBook, 5 Essential Steps to Modernize Your Service Desk.