Exploring Remote Working Solutions to Combat Crisis Situations: Employee Experience Calibration

Guiding your business through a crisis requires a strategic plan. Avtex suggests implementing a four-phased approach, including Contact Center Stabilization, Business Continuity Expansion, CX Alignment and Employee Experience Calibration.

In our previous blog post in the series, we reviewed the third step in the strategic process, CX Alignment, and explored the steps you can take to deliver exceptional experiences during a crisis.

In this post, we’ll continue to the fourth phase and examine the steps you can take to ensure employee satisfaction and productivity during and after a crisis.

Phase 4: Employee Experience Calibration

Supporting your employees during a crisis is critical to their well-being and overall job satisfaction. Without the proper technological, emotional and logistical support, employees are likely to experience significant frustration and confusion for the duration of the event.

Follow these critical steps to ensure that your employees have what they need to do their jobs during and after a crisis.

Objectively Examine Your Current State

A thorough examination of your current employee experience will shed light on the effectives of your efforts and any steps you must take to better support your staff. Encourage every employee to have a voice and share staff insights across the organization.

When reviewing your current state, be sure to find detailed answers to these questions:

• Are we enabling employees to do their job?
• Are employees engaged and satisfied with the current state?
• Are we communicating effectively with our employees?
• Do our tools, policies and procedures support our employees now and into the future?

Do not stop with this initial fact-finding endeavor – instead act on the answers to these questions. If employees are not able to do their jobs, identify any underlying issues negatively impacting their day-to-day operations and resolve them. By listening to – and acting on – feedback from your employees, you will demonstrate your care for their well-being and your commitment to supporting them through any situation.

Apply Learnings to the Future

Crisis situations, while disruptive in the short term, are often valuable learning opportunities for many organizations. Not only will a crisis shine light on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of your disaster planning, unforeseen events can also offer a glimpse into potential improvements to your organization’s overall operations.

Carefully review your organization’s response to the crisis – process or policy changes are good examples of places to look. Identify any strategies that improved operations, however small or insignificant those improvements may seem. Consider applying these changes – or variations of these changes – to your operations following the resolution of the crisis.

Pinpoint any strategies or actions that failed to positively impact the organization or customers during the crisis. Adjust your crisis response strategy as necessary to ensure that every action you take, no matter how little, has a positive impact on your customers, your employees and your brand.