4 Ways HR Leaders Can Enhance the Employee Life Cycle Experience

These days, enhancing the employee lifecycle experience is not a choice, it’s an imperative. The cost to replace an employee who leaves your company is 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary. You can’t afford that. Instead, invest in enhancing the employee experience. The ROI will be well worth it.

Where do you start?

In the latest episode of my podcast “Better Leaders, Better Workplaces ” with Michele Koch, Senior Vice President and Chief Culture and People Development Officer at Republic Bank, we discussed strategies that are working for their organization. I’ll share some of those strategies with you here.

4 Ways to Enhance Your Employee Life Cycle Experience

Michele identified 4 key elements that are foundational to elevating employee experience and enhancing talent attraction and retention.

Communication & Collaboration

At Republic Bank there is a focus on constantly improving the communication and collaboration between departments. One of the ways they do this is through a cross-departmental communications council. In this council there are representatives from different departments who come together on a regular basis to really talk about the challenges they're facing and actually look for opportunities and solutions to improve.?

In essence, it’s letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing so that walls between interdepartmental silos are transparent.?

Culture

Another area where Republic Bank is excelling is in the area of culture. And not just the culture for employees by being more inclusive, but also creating a more inclusive culture for their clients and community.

Regular listening sessions are hosted by senior leaders to build awareness and to drive change. Out of these listening sessions have come a transgender inclusive policy. They also were one of the first banks to celebrate Juneteenth - before it was federally mandated to do so. And they have done so much more.?

Employees are looking to be part of organizations that take the “human-first” approach so that they can feel they are working for more than just a paycheck.

Ownership

Tied into these listening sessions is the sense of ownership employees get from not only being heard - but also becoming part of the solutions. It’s not a traditional top-down approach to change, but rather a collaboration where employees themselves identify and contribute to the changes they see as reflecting their own values.?

This ownership is critical for creating an engaged workplace because it shifts the responsibility from those in leadership by introducing the lived-experiences of those who aren’t. Leaders can better understand challenges that they might not otherwise face.?

Opportunity

One of the less tragic results of the pandemic was how it provided employees a chance to reflect on the priorities in their lives and careers. For many, the realization they were stuck or plateaued in positions they were ill-suited for became so overwhelming that it led to what was called “the Great Resignation.”

For Republic Bank, responding to this meant providing greater opportunities for change and mobility within its structure to allow for more movement if employees wanted to shift the focus of their career.?

For some, this meant new roles, while for others, it simply meant realigning their current roles to something more in tune with how they lived their lives. As with many organizations, Republic Bank realized that some of the work that was traditionally performed on-campus could be conducted very effectively remotely - leading to more opportunities that were open to more people regardless of their current location.

A Role Model to Learn From

The expectations for employees today is that companies need to show they are invested as much in their people as they are in everything else in the business. Republic Banks’ commitment to enhancing the employee experience is a lesson for all organizations.?

To listen to the full discussion with Michele, please follow this link and subscribe to the Geeks, Geezers and Googlization podcast, “Better Leaders, Better Workplaces. ”

For more on the trends shaping the future of work , check out last week’s article.?

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