Four things employees want from their employers

I had a great trip to The Watercooler & The Office 2025 event at Excel last week. For those who missed it, it’s two days of seminars, workshops and exhibitions on the topics of employee wellbeing and workplace culture.

Here are some of my key takeaways:

Employees want to be heard not listened to

That might sound counter-intuitive, but the challenge in a lot of businesses is not a lack of opportunities to feedback or speak up. Contrary to the challenges of a few years ago, survey fatigue has set in in some workplaces and ERGs also add feedback and insights to survey results. The challenge now is interpreting this plethora of data and not just taking action but ensuring employees feel heard, even if all feedback can’t be acted on straight away. Being biased I’d say this comes back to maintaining a consistent employee narrative, sharing the roadmap honestly and authentically and ongoing communication on how changes will impact employee's daily experiences.

Employees want honest, compassionate, human conversations

With the assortment of digital benefits and wellbeing platforms, it’s critical to remember that these are simply the supporting tools. The real work is being done in the relationship between managers and employees. But here comes the challenge: supporting and training these ‘squeezed middle’ managers to ditch the scripted conversations in favour of having meaningful, compassionate and supportive conversations. Investing in this area could create a greater return on investment than incremental changes to employee experience even when rolled out on a macro scale.

Employees want employers to zoom in and out

Employees are looking for employers to zoom in and understand their individual experiences or challenges, as well as zoom out to make improvements in the end-to-end experience. These may feel intense but by solving individual issues employers can see the impact of small changes and should be asking themselves how scalable or repeatable they are.

Employees want to be brought on the journey

It’s clear that the workplace is changing at an alarming rate and with so much talk of this mystery ‘future of work’, it was great to join one of the seminars to make this more tangible. We looked at the key areas the workplace is changing, with the advice that employers can get themselves future fit by creating roadmaps for these specific topics. But it’s important to remember to bring employees on this journey too. Creating a clear narrative for each area and maintaining communication on each topic could yield great results.

• Technology
• Sustainability
• Flexibility
• Inclusion
• Wellbeing
• Purpose

Embracing mindfulness

My favourite moment of the event was listening to HSBC’s Sean Tolram 's story. Struggling to overcome constant small mistakes in his team's work, he turned to the art of mindfulness and soon got surprising results. He told us that by helping his team approach their tasks with the right mindset he soon found he could not only improve issues like accuracy, but could also reduce stress, improve overall productivity. Credit to HSBC for taking a leap of faith, he now runs their global mindfulness programme.

I'm on a mission to foster fairer, healthier, and happier workplaces, and I love to connect with like-minded people who share this vision. If you're passionate about creating positive change in the workplace, let's have a chat and see how we can work together to make a meaningful difference.