Modernizing Workplace Culture and the Employee Experience – Strategies for HR

Winter 2022-23

Jacob Lathrop

HR professionals are familiar with the formal definition of workplace culture, but what about the unspoken ways it makes our employees feel? Workplace culture is the feeling employees are left with when they leave work at the end of the day. It’s how they describe their days to family or friends. It’s whether they’re able to end the day with a clear mind or they have something nagging them and stealing their peace. And it could be the reason employees are leaving our institutions and even higher ed.

In his session at the 2022 CUPA-HR annual conference, Jacob Lathrop, consultant to the vice president/CHRO at Michigan State University, shared some of HR’s greatest challenges when it comes to employee retention, with workplace culture being a key factor. Lathrop pointed to McKinsey’s latest Great Attrition research which found three elements of employee experience that are equally important reasons for leaving a job:

not having caring leaders
not having sustainable work expectations
lack of career development and advancement

This is actually good news because these are areas where HR can influence workplace culture and provide strategic insights for campus leaders.

There are plenty of low-cost strategies HR can employ to modernize the workplace in a way that can help re-recruit top performers and draw new talent to the institution, even in today’s competitive labor market. Let’s explore some of the strategies from Lathrop’s session.

Modernize Job Infrastructure and Processes

Successful employee attraction and retention begins with job architecture. Take stock of your institution’s job listings and how they are perceived by job candidates. Are your job titles, descriptions and qualifications modern, attractive and easy to understand? Are you leaning into the idea of alternative credentials? For instance, is your institution getting away from requiring bachelor’s degrees for jobs that don’t really need them? Does your career website reflect your employment brand and promote your institution’s strengths? Is it easy to navigate? One way to find out is to try applying for one of the positions yourself. Does it work equally well on a cell phone?

Embrace Flexibility and Autonomy

We all know by now that work flexibility is key to retaining and attracting talent. Flexibility-driven workplaces consider three important factors:

Where work is done. Keep in mind that hybrid work models with set days in the office can be falsely flexible. Is the employee’s physical presence on those days required to get the job done?
When work is done. Consider employee autonomy options for hours of operation.
How work is done. Allow flexibility for task completion, where possible. Reward time-saving employee innovation by encouraging them to use the time saved to focus on stretch goals and projects, networking and professional development (rather than increasing workload).

Evolve Your Paid-Time-Off Programs

What is your current paid-time-off (PTO) suite? Is there an opportunity to expand upon this, particularly the paid holidays you provide? Can your institution expand the use of employee sick time to include mental health days? What about time off for community service work? The types of PTO days you include reflect what’s important to your institution and influence workplace culture.

Address Burnout

Can you institute email “blackout” hours? Some workplaces in Europe turn on an auto-delete function for emails delivered while an employee is on vacation. While this may not be realistic for employees at your institution, think about what boundaries to set when it comes to employee vacation time so they can take a true vacation from work.

Additionally, set parameters around the why and when of meetings. Can you promote independent work time or make certain hours/days off limits for meetings? Another consideration is to implement special summer hours or adjusted schedules based on business needs. Of course, all of these examples must be demonstrated by organization leaders for employees to fully embrace them themselves.

Focus on Purpose

Employees can lose sight of their professional purpose and passion in the day-to-day grind. Reignite employee purpose with expedition days and innovation sessions. Expedition days are opportunities for faculty and staff to share their work and learn about what others do on campus. When people share what they do with others, employees begin to see how their work impacts others. They also get to know their colleagues across campus and see people as people, which boosts teamwork and collaboration.

Innovation sessions are dedicated time for your teams to think creatively. During these sessions, prompt innovative thinking by asking employees what they, their teams and the institution can do to make processes better.

Managers must provide employees and teams with agency. They can do this by providing clarity on the expected outcomes and at the same time providing flexibility in the journey to achieve them; practicing empathy-based leadership; and focusing on performance outcomes and expectation fulfillment while letting go of input-based performance, such as hours worked.

Make Appreciation Your Talent Strategy’s Heartbeat

Appreciation must be engrained in your culture — not a fad or a box to check. Consistently show your employees they are valued. Some ideas for doing so are hosting paid luncheons (nothing brings people together like food!), starting a peer recognition program, including employee highlights in a newsletter if your institution sends one, and taking field trips as a team.

Be Intentional About Employee Well-Being

Well-being encompasses all the things that are important to us and how we experience our lives. Lathrop shared in his session some eye-opening well-being data from Gallup:

$20 million of additional lost opportunity for every 10,000 workers due to struggling or suffering employees
75 percent of medical costs accrued mostly due to preventable conditions
$322 billion of turnover and lost productivity cost globally due to employee burnout
15-20 percent of total payroll in voluntary turnover costs, on average, due to burnout

CUPA-HR’s toolkits are great central hubs for health and well-being resources. Check out the Health and Well-Being Toolkit and the Mental Health Toolkit.

Expand Career-Exploration Programs

What university programs can be offered to excite employees about learning something new? Some formats to explore are career paths and advancement programs, job-shadowing programs, job-rotation programs, informational interview programs and intern-to-hire programs for students.

Shift the Management Mindset

Emphasize a Relational Dynamic

Modern work is reflective of an employer/employee dynamic that is relational, not transactional. As HR pros, isn’t that exactly what we hope to achieve in our work? To tend to the “human” in human resources rather than checking off boxes? These strategies are a great starting point for HR to retain and attract talent at our institutions.

Five Tips to Modernize Your Recruitment Strategy

Change the way you refer to talent attraction. Instead of calling it “talent acquisition,” call it talent attraction and alignment. People aren’t transactions and don’t want to be “acquired.”
Re-recruit your top performers. What drew these employees to the institution initially? Gathering this information is as easy as a simple ask.
Dedicate resources to internal talent alignment. This is an important aspect of a recruitment strategy that is often overlooked. HR should dedicate staff to make sure units have the right staffing/organizational structures, the right jobs and the right people associated with those roles.
Explore the creation of a program to identify your best and brightest and use them as peer recruiters. Talented people want to work with other talented people.
Establish a multi-faceted approach to talent attraction. A multigenerational workforce has different needs. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach.

About the presenter: Jacob Lathrop is consultant to the vice president/CHRO at Michigan State University. For more tips from Jacob on modernizing workplace culture, watch CUPA-HR’s on-demand webinar, Modern Work: Organizational Success Fueled by HR.

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