What the Return-to-Office Debate Misses: Employees Are Customers
Employees are customers who decide daily how much energy to give to their work. Here’s how leaders can understand and segment their workforce to identify what employees want most — and act on it.
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Too many companies treat employees as costs rather than customers who choose how much effort to bring to work. Return-to-office mandates, for example, imply a lack of trust. Even when organizations pursue employee-centric policies, many treat workers like one monolithic group. A key research insight: Organizations must segment their workforces, much as they do with customers. Only then can leaders address different segments’ needs, to motivate and retain people, through specific practices.
The ongoing debate about return-to-office mandates is a symptom of a bigger issue. Most companies treat employees as a cost to be managed rather than customers who choose how much of their personal energy and effort to bring to work every day. Your organization likely knows a lot about customer value: There is also tremendous value to be generated when employees love their work — or to be lost when they are frustrated or exasperated by it.
The concept of employee centricity isn’t new, but the way organizations have pursued it has been largely simplistic and problematic for various reasons. For example, most employee engagement surveys simply ask workers what they want. Meanwhile, consumer researchers use sophisticated analytics tools, like conjoint, max-diff, and regression analyses, to gain much deeper insights.
A case in point: In a global survey of more than 11,000 employees, BCG Henderson Institute researchers asked a direct question: “Why would you take a new job?” Not surprisingly, the respondents typically referred to functional aspects of work, such as pay, benefits, perks, and hours. Then the researchers looked deeper, using correlations between satisfaction and retention, to determine what factors predict whether someone is likely to stay in a job. With this more rigorous analysis, emotional factors, such as feeling respected, valued, and supported, dominated the top five. Pay dropped all the way to No. 15 in importance among the list of 22 functional and emotional attributes of work. In other words, pay matters when someone is already looking to leave — it affects where people apply for a new job. But if you want to prevent people from starting that job search in the first place, emotional needs matter most.
Perhaps even more unfortunate, nearly all organizational attempts at employee value delivery treat employees like a monolithic group, rarely recognizing segments with differentiated characteristics and needs. And when they analyze the overall results from annual surveys aimed at better understanding employees’ needs, leaders often use that one-size-fits-all lens. If companies do segment their workforce, they usually do so based on demographic identity — often as part of efforts to support specific communities, such as women.
But our research has shown that segmenting employees based on traditional demographics can obscure critical information about them.