We're not alone in championing employee engagement and experience, but RECESS@WORK is the only in-office curator of creative events. Here’s what we’re reading to stay informed and inspired:
Most employees (68%) said they think "work perks" are just as important as health coverage, life insurance and other traditional benefits, according to a survey of 600 small and midsize businesses by Zenefits. The HR software company said small businesses without big-company resources can compete for talent in the tight labor market by offering popular fringe benefits that don't cost much to provide.
Nearly 80 percent of executives rated employee experience very important (42 percent) or important (38 percent), but only 22 percent reported that their companies were excellent at building a differentiated employee experience.
“…there may be other ways for you to view this moment as the perfect time to rethink the shape and character of your workforce. Such new thinking will generate a whole new human resource development agenda, one quite probably emphasizing those innate human capacities that can provide a renewed strategy for success that is both technological and human.”
If you prioritize EX, you’ll be one of a growing number of companies discovering the power of EX to positively impact business performance in many areas. Research by Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage, shows that organizations that invested most heavily in EX were:
included 11.5 times as often in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work
listed 4.4 times as often in LinkedIn’s list of North America’s Most In-Demand Employers
28 times more often listed among Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies
listed 2.1 times as often on the Forbes list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies
twice as often found in the American Customer Satisfaction Index
Most importantly, he finds that “experiential organizations had more than 4 times the average profit and more than 2 times the average revenue. They were also almost 25 percent smaller, which suggests higher levels of productivity and innovation.”
“Music, especially on the piano, forces your brain to think and your body to operate in multiple layers. This translates effectively into coding, especially as we get into building more in-depth web applications. You have to be able to know how to organize a large amount of complexity in the concepts you’re learning, and to triage and prioritize an overwhelming amount of information at one time.”
[Music] has been notably beneficial when undertaking aspects of software engineering such as algorithm design, logic development, and being able to see the “forest”of an engineering challenge prior to focusing on the “trees”.
The program, called Maverick, was designed to challenge the conventional view of employer-employee relationships as transactional and to find new ways to win the hearts and minds of our organization’s employees. We wanted to harness their best critical thinking and collaboration skills for the benefit of the organization, and we also hoped to provide an alternative to the traditional manager-employee hierarchical relationship.
