EXJournal

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.

"Employees don't leave companies. Employees leave managers." 

There is this widely held belief by a great number of HR pros that to have true employee engagement, your employees must feel like they have meaningful work. I don’t necessarily disagree with that thought process.

Over the past year or so, the phrase “employee experience” has barged its way into conversations about human resources and employee engagement. The more you see the phrase, the easier it is to dismiss as simply a new buzzword; repackaging the same old HR stuff under a new label. Don’t make that mistake.

Welcome to the first article on millennial employee experience from finder.com.au Head of Talent Jamie Finnegan: part two coming soon!

Pop quiz! What’s going to be more useful to you in the long run: a high engagement survey score with a low response rate, or a low engagement score with a high response rate?

Employee engagement has become an industry centered around surveys. Companies compete on who has the best, the biggest, the most comprehensive solution – despite the fact there’s not much difference between any of them. After all, there’s only so many ways to ask employees how engaged they are in their work…

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.

How do we measure things like engagement and experience? We ask questions. But what if asking the question changes the very thing we are trying to measure? Here’s a newsflash: That’s exactly what happens. And it’s not a bad thing — in fact it’s a huge opportunity, because the questions themselves can be subtle but powerful change agents.

Communication is a spectrum. On the left is face to face. On the right is a YouTube comment section. In the middle are all manner of different ways of connecting. Bluetooth phone calls while driving. Group WhatsApp with those folk you met at a festival. Teleconferences where one dude is at an airport and only ever remembers to press mute before he starts talking. Each of these different ways of communicating has its own rules of acceptable behavior. There’s probably things you’d say in an email that you’d not say face to face. I’ve certainly found myself on written rants that would have evaporated in a instance in a corridor conversation.