Numbers are easy*. Anyone can take an employee survey and make something of it: response rate is obvious, unhappy and engaged answers easily coded. We can chart results and turn them into reports and pretty infographics with a bare minimum of effort. 77% of employees hate the food in the cafeteria! 31% of millennials in Townsville stay for the beanbags! Numbers, saving us from too much thinking since forever. Unfortunately, numbers are also simple. Surveys in particular condense a whole heap of potentially mind-blowing information into a single, easily digestible figure. Say I discover that only 31% of employees think …
Fairness – what is it, and how should it be measured?
Fairness is widely studied within academic literature, where it is known as Organisational Justice. However, it is not commonly measured within organisations themselves. Perhaps because organisations don’t fully understand its importance and relationship to business outcomes. In the literature, Organisational Justice is defined as “the extent to which employees perceive workplace procedures, interactions, and outcomes to be fair in nature” (Baldwin, 2004). It is typically broken down into three factors: Distributive Justice – the perceived fairness of the distribution of rewards based on work input. It is important to note that employees perceive fairness by comparing their rewards to that …
The truth about employer branding
We can talk all day about employer branding – and we often do. My friend Lars Schmidt has a definition that I like (and shamelessly use): “Your employer brand, at its core, is the shared values and employee experiences of your organization.” The important part of that definition, in my estimation, is “employee experiences”: the most critical and often overlooked part of the equation. Branding is often the sparkly part of HR. There are keynote speakers talking about it, talent acquisition experts in charge of Employer Branding departments, and loyal devotees acting like evangelical preachers while rolling out EB initiatives …
Fairness is an employee experience thing
Fairness is a thing. More of a thing than it used to be. A thing with the ability to upset elections and change voting patterns. Democracy has delivered a few well-deserved reminders of late that people really do care about fairness. Those people are voters and customers. They are also employees. The science of measuring of employee engagement and mood is well-established. And while it is straightforward to demonstrate the connection between engagement and enterprise value, it’s difficult to translate better measurements into building a better employee experience. It often feels like we get tied up in theory and reporting …