No one wants employees to be unhappy, and the pandemic has shown the value staff can bring to an organization when times are hard.

Equally this turbulent period has seen workers re-evaluate what they want from work and subsequently millions have left their jobs as part of the ‘Great Resignation‘.

As a result, many businesses have reviewed wages, benefits, and perks. However, increasing spending doesn’t always mean that employees are happier. In fact, they can feel overlooked as more money is spent within the organization in different divisions.

In these times, soft skills can be invaluable. Soft skills are attributes like collaboration, empathy, critical thinking, and communication.

To discuss the importance of soft skills more and contextualize the data surrounding employee experience, UNLEASH discussed these topics with Pierre Lindmark, founder and CEO of employee engagement platform Winningtemp.

Understanding employees

Monster’s ‘The Future of Work 2021: Global Hiring Outlook’ reported that employers listed the top skills they want in staff as dependability, teamwork and collaboration, flexibility, and problem-solving. With this in mind, there’s a clear intersection where soft skills and employee experience are important.

Lindmark offered his perspective on the issues that companies face: “It’s very easy to make your own assumption [about employee experience], but you’d rely too much on your gut feeling of talking to one person.”

As a result, employee engagement needs to be monitored across the organization.

However, a one time a year survey doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the experience of employees. Lindmark reasons: “Today, we are in a much more agile world, we are changing much faster, so you need to get the voice right now.

“You need to understand it, then you need to work with it and involve people.

“If people are leaving the organizations [before you listen to them] then you don’t have the speed to involve people to understand the problem and design the experience together.”

Adapting to the needs of employees

As the world of work changes so do employee expectations, this creates a climate where the need to monitor their thoughts becomes paramount.

Lindmark notes: “The change that we’re seeing is from the perspective of customer experience to employee experience and why that is becoming more of a corporate strategy and the importance of it.

“I would say that because of the situation we’ve been going through. For us, it’s been a change where we’re more focused on maintaining people in the organization and optimizing their experience so it’s as ideal as possible.

“With the change that we’ve been seeing, with many people leaving organizations, there is a specific point where you need to find your DNA in the company standard.”

When it comes to identifying the DNA of a company, there are questions around job satisfaction and the issues that impact employees. Lindmark reasons that companies “need to get more of the data“.

Drilling down on satisfaction, Lindmark says: “There are two parts, one is where employees can understand how they can improve work satisfaction which requires self-leadership; employees can create better work satisfaction by giving advice.

“The second part is about the leadership that will be thinking, ‘how do I moderate this process?’ It’s the same way, you get some insights and actionable things you can do.

Positive workplace experiences

Ultimately, collecting data allows for facts to be presented during discussions and creates processes for improving experiences.

Lindmark reflects on his own experience “I can give you an example, we will have meetings starting where you will have 45 minutes meeting.

“Before we were just thinking about productivity, things like the project deadlines, instead, now, we spend ten minutes of the first meeting using data and visualizing it to everyone, saying this is what we need.”

Pierre Lindmark, founder & CEO at Winningtemp

Having data on how people interact with another, how they develop soft skills, and their overall feeling is invaluable to a culture shift.

Lindmark notes that companies traditionally spend 80% of meetings focusing on the negatives within the organization. But this can change. Lindmark believes that data on employees can enable largely positive meetings that celebrate the workplace.

Of course, the data can also be used to quickly identify issues and stop them from growing.

Lindmark concludes: “By having all of these things [data findings] open, and then connected to projects, for example, you can start by talking about the positive things and get more of the positive behavior from the beginning.

“When we talk about affecting behaviors and attitudes, and the psychological link to the feeling that, there are really good things happening.”

The only thing left to do is to get insight into your business and begin improving soft skills and culture.

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Get more insight – download ‘9 factors that matter most to employee experience’, our how-to guide from Winningtemp today.