Bringing a love-centered approach to your top 10 employee experiences

Love can be heavy.

Expectations are high when it comes to love so it’s understandable that we stumble to think of ways to bring love to work.

But like all big things in life, it helps to break them down into smaller steps. In my experience, love can be found in the small moments. It’s not in the grand gestures.

So, what are the moments in people’s experiences at work that can benefit from a love-centered approach?

In this blog post, I guide you through 10 employee experiences where you can make 3 micro ‘love’ resets that can help your people feel seen, heard, appreciated, valued, and maybe even loved.

Let’s begin.

Start at hello – the attraction and recruitment experience

“Clear is kind”, says Brené Brown and this couldn’t be truer for recruitment. Having worked in recruitment myself, I understand the pressure to hedge your bets and see how the market responds but this approach is not clear, or kind and it may cost you great candidates and potentially damage your brand as an employer.

So, what to do instead? Consider rethinking your approach to recruitment in these 3 ways.

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Advertise the remuneration or salary range clearly.
• Include the contact details of the recruiter - people want to connect with a human about this important decision. For high-volume recruitment, consider videos or helpful FAQ resources that allow candidates to have their questions answered personably.
• Keep candidates informed and commit to responding to every applicant about the outcome of their application – ghosting is not cool, and this applies to recruitment. Choose cool, choose love and consider joining The Circle Back Initiative.

For other great tips about injecting love and laughter into your recruitment experience, do yourself a favour and connect with and follow Adam Karpiak on LinkedIn.

From hello to welcome - before the first day

'Have I made the right decision?' is the question every candidate asks themselves from the moment they accept a job with your organisation. Make sure the answer is, “Hell yes”! This starts with their experience even before they have started.

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Make sure their IT works before they start. It’s simple, but often the first frustration new employees face on their first day. This is perhaps the most loving thing you can do for a new starter!
• Provide information about the induction and onboarding experience and include as much information as possible – this helps reduce uncertainty and helps ease the jitters of starting a new role.
• Make lunch plans for their first day – no one should have to eat lunch alone on their first day in a new job.

A warm welcome – the onboarding and induction experience

An onboarding experience that communicates ‘you matter’ will deliver numerous benefits including improved attraction and retention, increased engagement and job satisfaction, productivity and effectiveness, improved understanding of role and responsibilities, alignment to organisational purpose and values and a feeling of connectedness and belonging. So, start as you mean to go on!

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Think about how you would like your new employees to feel at various stages of their onboarding and induction experience and design the experience to support these emotions – you want your people to feel welcome, appreciated and connected, not confused, frustrated and uncertain. Consider using the Emotional Culture Deck to guide your crafting of the emotional journey of your onboarding and induction experience. Access your free download here: The Emotional Culture Deck PDF (from ridersandelephants.com) or get in touch with me and I can talk you through it!
• Design a two-way onboarding and induction experience – Invite contributions from your new employees throughout the onboarding and induction experience so they are active contributors rather than passive consumers. If you win them over, they might even volunteer to join your induction and onboarding committee!
• Offer to connect employees with a buddy and a mentor outside their immediate team to help grow their network instantly. Provide flexibility and choice in the allocation process where possible.

Feeling seen, heard and valued - recognition and appreciation

Gallup’s Employee Engagement Research has consistently emphasised the importance of recognition and appreciation in boosting employee engagement levels, which in turn drive higher organisational performance.

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Codify appreciation into your organisation’s ways of working to ensure it happens regularly and consistently – consider adding appreciation to meeting agendas, one-on-one catch-ups and other ‘in the flow’ of work processes. Don’t wait for people to leave to finally appreciate them.
• Mark professional AND personal milestones such as work anniversaries, birthdays, graduations, births, and new homes, and celebrate them – review your policies and be thoughtful in your approach to ensure these milestones and celebrations are inclusive and reflect the diversity of your workforce. Seek feedback on this from your employees and customise the experiences. Remember the platinum rule, treat others as they wish to be treated and to know how they would like to be treated, ask them!
• Recognise people in ways that matter – monetary incentives have been traditionally used to recognise people’s hard work and contribution and this still stands. There is also new research that suggests that symbolic awards such as congratulatory cards, public recognition and certificates can also significantly increase motivation, performance, and retention. The key is in how this symbolic recognition is done and a great article that explores the detail is Research: A Little Recognition Can Provide a Big Morale Boost. (hbr.org)

Workplace design – the what, where and how of work

Your workplace design will intentionally (or perhaps unintentionally) communicate a prompt to your employees. Make sure you thoughtfully design for the behaviour you would like to see.

This applies to how you design your workplace culture, your workspaces (both physically and virtually) and your people’s work.

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Instead of mandating ‘return to the office’ or forcing people to work a percentage of the week in the office, consider collaborating with team leaders and their teams to help them find their way of working that allows them to plan their week in three buckets of work: deep work, monkey work and teamwork. For more insights into this, read Carl Newport’s book Deep Work.
• Creating spaces that support the work our people are doing – whether our people are remote, hybrid or in the office, we need to rethink our workspaces to ensure they support the work our people are doing. Back to Carl Newport’s work buckets, we need to design spaces that support teamwork, and these spaces won’t necessarily be the same spaces that support the deep work. Designing for purposeful work is important and it communities to your people that they matter.
• Actively craft your workplace’s emotional culture – every workplace has a default emotional culture, and every team has its own emotional sub-culture. These default emotional cultures drive the way our employees behave. If these cultures are positive, we can expect connection, motivation and engagement. If they are negative, they lead to negative outcomes, poor performance and high turnover. But could we actively craft that emotional culture? Yes, we have an opportunity to influence how our people feel by the way we craft and design our emotional workplace culture. A great place to start to unpack this is the Emotional Culture Deck. Access free download here: The Emotional Culture Deck PDF (ridersandelephants.com) or get in touch and we can talk about how you might do this for your organisation.

People leading people - leaders that make your people want to stay!

Leadership is one skill set AI won’t be mastering anytime soon, and how your leaders lead their people and leverage their teams will continue to be one of your most important competitive advantages. So how do you set them up well to lead and engage your people?

You invest in your leaders and their leadership capability.

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Invest in developing your leaders’ self-leadership – how we lead ourselves informs the way we lead others and it’s important that we invest in helping our leaders understand their purpose, values, behaviour and derailers to allow them to lead others from a place of authenticity, empathy and integrity.
• Transform your Leaders into coaches – invest in upskilling your leaders to adopt a coaching approach to the way they lead and unlock their capacity to step up while growing their people’s capacity for ownership and accountability.
• Empower your leaders to face into brave conversations – avoiding tough conversations continues to plague most organisations and gets in the way of a healthy and productive workplace culture. Empowering leaders with the mindset, tools and language to have these conversations is the quickest way to move from a ‘nice’ yet toxic culture to an open and loving culture.

Meetings – make them fun again!

Meetings are often cited as the biggest time waster in organisations. So how can we make meetings fun again? How can meetings help rather than hinder your people’s work?

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Define the WHY of every meeting as a practice – when we clarify the context of a meeting, we create an opportunity for people to make sound decisions about who needs to be there and what role they are there to play.
• Turn agenda items into questions to be answered.
• Consider turning important meetings where everyone’s voice is needed as a thinking environment – more information about transforming meetings using the thinking environment can be found in Nancy Kline’s books, Time to Think and More Time to Think Home. Time to Think or reach out to me for a conversation.

Communicate like you can never over-communicate!

When I was working in both the people space as well as learning and development, communication was always among the top 3 areas to address in employee engagement surveys. It seemed that we were never communicating enough.

So how do we communicate in a way that fosters an open and transparent culture that also highly values confidentiality?

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Don’t assume everything is confidential – I was often floored by how people defaulted to information being confidential without really examining if that was true. Don’t confuse a need to retain power as a reason to keep information confidential unnecessarily.
• Over-communicate and then some – people want to know as much as possible. Our brain hates uncertainty and ambiguity so the more information we can share, regardless of how small or insignificant, it’s something that they didn’t know and will help avoid overthinking, rumination, backchanneling and catastrophising.
• Offer people options in channels and form – where possible, share your messages across different platforms (email, Slack, Teams, Yammer etc.) and use diverse forms of communication such as video.

Saying goodbye and keeping in touch – the exit experience

Leaving an organisation can lead to feelings of grief for the departing employee as well as their colleagues. How we treat our leaving employees is a powerful testament to how we value and treat our people. Don’t let the exit experience inspire others to leave too.

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Codify exit interviews into your employee life cycle so every employee is invited and has the opportunity to contribute to an exit conversation.
• Choose wisely who leads these conversations and have a process for actioning the feedback.
• Ask the employee how they would like to be farewelled. Another great example of living the platinum rule of treating people as they want to be treated.

Lasting impression – the last day experience

Whatever the circumstances of an employee’s departure, it can be a deeply emotional experience. It takes deliberate thought and care to ensure that the departing employee leaves with a lasting positive impression of their time in your organisation. We want our employees to feel appreciated, valued and celebrated. And we want those employees remaining to feel proud and reassured by the way the organisation handles departures.

Top 3 micro ‘love’ resets:

• Communicate employee departures in a timely and sensitive way. Don’t let an ‘out of office email’ tell the rest of your employees that the person is no longer working there. That leaves a very bitter taste in everyone’s mouth.
• Ensure gifts and experiences are consistent but make room to communicate thought and care and cater for the individual person.
• Invite your employee to join an alumni community and make it worthwhile and special.

And finally…

This quick whip through the top 10 employee experiences demonstrates that there are so many places we can start. So many of these resets can be made straight away to bring more love to people’s experiences at work. And it’s a process that will continue to evolve as new employees start and departing employees share parting feedback. Take it all on board because we all define love differently and that’s both wonderful and messy, which is the essence of being human.

Where will you begin?

If you'd like to learn more about Work of Love and co-designing love-centered employee experiences in your organisation, please email me, schedule a 15-min call or connect via LinkedIn. Speak soon...

With love,

Jasmine