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Is employee engagement undervalued in organisations? One way to ensure that it isn’t is by taking a 'moments that matter' approach. By identifying these key moments, companies can create a concrete plan to optimise for them and use technology to streamline processes.
What Are the Moments That Matter?
The term ‘moments that matter’ is a way of thinking about organisational engagement from an employee’s perspective. The moments in question are those key interactions, across the employee lifecycle, that have an effect on an employee’s satisfaction and engagement.
Some examples of moments might include:
An employee’s first day on the job
Their first performance review
Conversations with their manager
Their exit interview with the company
As you can see, these moments span the entire employee journey and are not limited to the first day on the job or the onboarding phase. Thought about another way, these moments that matter are essentially your organisation’s employer value proposition coming to life.
How Do You Introduce a ‘Moments That Matter’ Approach?
There are two steps to introducing this kind of approach, and they rely on two phases:
Identifying those key moments
Building processes around them
The first lies in identification. Your workforce is unique, and so it makes sense for your leaders or your HR team to identify the moments that matter to them. Run surveys, conduct interviews or simply talk to employees about their experiences thus far.
Then, you need to build processes that optimise for these moments. To make that happen, we’d recommend building cross-functional teams that help weigh in, build and champion any initiatives that your organisation wants to run.
But, let’s make this a bit more real with an example…
Putting the Moments That Matter Into Practice
After speaking with employees, line managers and executive leaders, your team has identified a moment that matters to your employees: performance reviews.
And, after speaking to a host of employees, you realise that your performance review process is not fit for purpose. It is simply too short and doesn’t dedicate the time employees want to discuss their development. It is too much about basic evaluation.
Bringing together a group of employees across various departments and seniority levels, you ask them the following:
What would your ideal performance process look like?
Who would you want to be involved in the process?
Do you see value in getting feedback from peers?
Do you know how to give feedback to peers?
How would you want to discuss your development?
After hosting these conversations, your team realises that your performance reviews need to embrace more 360 degree feedback, and you need to train your line managers to facilitate more development-focused conversations and build career progression frameworks.
In doing this work, you have now optimised for an important moment that matters to your employees. Congratulations!
The Role of Technology in the Moments That Matter
Technology can play a key role in any strategy revolving around the moments that matter. You can use them not only to solicit feedback from employees, but to build automated processes that can help run programmes more effectively.
Take performance reviews or onboarding, as an example. For an HR software like Personio, you can build templated to-do lists which can be applied across your organisation, automatically reminding employees (and managers) what needs to be done and when.
Or, you can collect feedback from employees and their peers to create a more comprehensive 360 degree review process. Then, you can run an entire performance cycle at the click of a button. Now, you never have to worry about missing review season.
The role of technology is not to replace these moments, but to optimise them. Employees have different wants and needs, but the main thing they want is consistent – and a consistent process that is reliable.
Speak with one of our HR experts today about the moments that matter to your employees, and how introducing a new solution can help make those moments more meaningful.
