Empowering employees through belonging and personalisation

To tackle the challenges of a multigenerational workforce and an increased demand for workplace purpose, belonging, and certainty, HR must create a personalised employee experience, one expert has said.

In a recent HR Leader Podcast episode, Elyse Philippi (pictured), people and culture director in APAC at Insight, reflected on why employees currently want more from the workplace and how HR departments can cater to a workforce with more generations than ever before.

Certainty through ‘moments that matter’

In the challenges of a dynamic workforce environment, leadership must create certainty for its employees to empower its workplaces, Philippi said.

For Philippi, this does not require HR departments to be soothsayers; instead, she emphasised that HR creates certainty through transparency, where employees are kept up to date with company goals, provided clear training plans and opportunities to upskill so that they can also achieve their own goals.

“In the construct of that uncertainty, those ‘moments that matter’ [become] increasingly important,” she said.

Philippi noted that across the workforce, employees increasingly want to gain purpose and belonging at work. Following the evolution of the way that people engage in society following the pandemic, there has been an increasing amount of responsibility placed on workplaces to provide a sense of happiness and connection that historically, family, religious, or sporting communities used to provide.

She added that amid the uncertainty within all of these communities, employees see their workplaces as environments with potential to provide a stable environment where purpose, belonging, happiness and connection can be delivered.

To create “moments that matter” throughout the employee journey, HR departments must ensure that employees feel connected, heard and seen, Philippi emphasised.

Personalising the employee journey amid the multigenerational workforce

Philippi found that emerging workforce nuances such as multiple generations, increasing diversity, and rising expectations around hybrid working, and by extension productivity expectations, are causing HR departments to start looking to make smarter and faster decisions.

“We have an increasing number of generations in the workforce, and they all work in different ways. So personalisation is a really important strategy to getting the best out of each of those different groups of people,” she said.

“One of the challenges is really knowing where to start, what will bring the most value for our teammates, how we get there, and really defining that step well.”

Philippi stressed the importance of businesses having a clear and defined vision, aligning stakeholders with this vision and understanding how HR departments can influence employee experience in a considered and intentional way to reap a return on investment.