Roadmap to Rebuild Employee Confidence and Crafting a Stellar Company Culture

The good news is that according to the latest Gallup polling data, employee engagement reached an all-time high in 2022. The bad news is that the all-time high is 23%. The additional bad news is that we’re also at a record high for stress with 44% of respondents saying they experience high levels of stress.

We should point out that there are a few contributing factors to low employee confidence and a poor work culture that are simply beyond your scope of control to fix. Poor leadership, for example, won’t be remedied with kegs in the breakroom, and shifts in the market can’t be corrected with DEI initiatives.

However, let’s take a look at the canaries in the coal mine that you can have a positive impact on that can lead to improved confidence and culture.

High employee turnover: If you can’t hire enough new staff to replace those jumping ship there is a good chance either confidence is low in your organization or the culture is toxic or both. From poor compensation packages to resource mismanagement and ineffective leadership, there are many contributing factors to a high turnover rate, but the first warning sign that your employee confidence is cratering is an uptick in turnover.

Addressing high employee turnover: There’s a possibility that your leadership doesn’t care if your employee retention is low, but there’s a stronger likelihood that they just aren’t aware. The current turnover rate in the tech industry is 13%, so if you’re thinking, “That seems low to me,” your C-suite likely isn’t aware that you’re churning employees faster than your competition. Educating leadership won’t right the ship right away, but if they aren’t aware they have a problem, they won’t know to put the appropriate resources toward addressing the problem.

Tips for improving turnover rates:

• Improve compensation packages (more money less problems)
• Hire for the culture you want (be the change you want to see)
• Invest in an inclusive work environment (make people feel safe)
• Provide reward and recognition programs (make people feel valued)
• Implement training programs up and down the org (position people for success)
• Conduct interviews with current and exiting employees (learn what is and isn’t working from the source)
• Regularly evaluate policies (audit and improve how you do business internally)
  Emphasize work-life balance (let people live outside of work)

While there is no retention-improving silver bullet, there are many ways you can begin to approach your high-turnover turmoil and begin to rebuild your employee confidence and drive toward a better company culture. Better salaries might not be feasible for your organization, so focus your efforts on areas you can improve to help offset that discrepancy.

When employees stop fleeing for the exits, confidence among your staff thinking that “This is the place I want to work.” will increase.

Glassdoor reviews: Pick your favorite employer review site here, but for the sake of this blog looking at Glassdoor is a good place to start when it comes to how potential hires might view your organization because it’s a reflection of how current (or former) employees view your organization.

Hirable humans that will also be a positive influence on your culture aren’t likely to join an organization with bad PR on Glassdoor, making your task of hiring for the culture you want immensely more difficult.

Improving Glassdoor reviews: The best way to improve your Glassdoor status is to improve your company culture. Of course, as you work toward that goal, make sure you’re encouraging existing employees (who are now seeing the fruits of your labor to improve the employee experience) to leave honest reviews on Glassdoor to help bolster your score.

You might not be the same toxic organization you were a year ago, so it’s important that employer review sites are updated with a more accurate reflection of your work culture. This can, and will likely, take time to improve, but it’s vital for instilling confidence in your existing workforce and attracting better talent to further bolster the positive culture you’re rebuilding.

Legal complaints: Organizations with questionable cultures are more likely to face legal consequences. Conversely, if your organization seems to always be at risk of stepping on legal landmines there’s a good chance your culture is in need of some resuscitation. Complaints related to workplace harassment or discrimination can result in costly legal action against your org, which only exposes you to reputational damage, and potential loss of talent.

Mitigating legal complaints: Improving education and providing training around employee rights and responsibilities is critical to mitigating legal complaints. Whether it’s informing managers what they can and can’t say to an employee requesting a leave of absence to employees feeling they can’t live their true selves at the workplace without being harassed, the more emphasis leadership and People Ops teams put on educating their employee population on the do’s and don’ts in the workplace the quicker you can reduce these culture-sinking risks.

Employee engagement scores: If you’re wondering how engaged your employee population is today and the thought, “we don’t know what we don’t know,” floats to the surface there is a good chance you’re not operating from a position of strength. Knowledge is power when it comes to company culture, and make no mistake about it, crafting a stellar culture and improving employee confidence can take accurate insights and some serious elbow grease.

If your turnover is high, Glassdoor reviews low, and legal complaints steadily flowing, there is a good chance your employee engagement isn’t anything to brag about. If your employee engagement scores are low today, were low last quarter, and were low the quarter before that, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that your employee engagement is low and therefore your culture has wallowing in the depths of toxic soup.

Improving employee engagement: If you aren’t surveying your employees today, that’s step one. You need to turn “we don’t know what we don’t know,” into “we know exactly where we stand.” Like employee turnover, employee engagement is another broad topic to tackle. To help narrow down your scope of focus, make sure the employee engagement survey questions you’re asking are specific and actionable.

The more pointed the questions, the more helpful the responses will be in your quest to improve your scores. The most important step, however, is what happens next. If your organization asks for input from employees and their cries for help fall on deaf ears, you run the risk of actually hurting your employee engagement results.

Always be transparent and realistic about what you hope to improve as it pertains to employee engagement so that your employees feel heard and don’t feel like empty promises are being made. You might not be able to solve every problem that needs fixing right out of the gate, but employees will always appreciate honesty, even if it’s about a potentially lengthy roadmap to creating a more positive place to work.