Here is a bold statement to start things off: Your employees are your new most important customers and your HR department is fast becoming your most strategic business unit.

What happened? How did things get like this?

It is quite simple actually. Employees finally decided that they could leave their jobs whenever they wanted. Gone are the days of the loyal working ant who dutifully performs the task it is given, now is the time of the frivolous worker bee, who buzzes around looking for the prettiest of all the flowers.

What does that mean for you, for us, for companies across the world?

Well, it means that the Company itself is the new product and the Employees are its consumers. Now, a product has features (benefits, status, salary, etc.), it has a user experience (EX, culture, etc.), a means of user interface (remote/hybrid/in-person, amenities, etc.), a customer service (one-on-ones, surveys, etc.), and even a set of associated values (DEI, community involvement, social impact, etc.). In other words, a product is designed and thought through for an optimal customer experience from the beginning to the end.

Perhaps most importantly, a product is marketed, and a product is sold.

The first step to a successful commercial strategy is to understand your audience, your customers, namely, through analytics. This is where employee analytics make their grand entrance into the realm of HR, Employee Experience, and corporate culture.

Understanding your employees - what interests them, what engages them, what will nurture their loyalty, and what will ensure their satisfaction - is now a primordial component of formulating a value proposition that will not only compel top employees to remain at your organization, but also attract top talent from others, and ensure that all of your people are consistently performing at their best. And for the first time, the answer to those questions won’t be more money, but more fulfillment, mental health, trust, belonging, and more. In other words, soft needs, not hard needs.

You can’t respond to soft-needs with hard-ware!

Hey, who doesn’t like material things? I can’t stand here and tell you that money, tasty snacks, or cool swag won’t help make your employees a little happier with their job, but I will stand here and tell you that it will no longer be enough to make them more productive or loyal to your company in the long run.

So, what you need is to design strategies that will answer the Human needs of your employees, make them feel recognized, welcomed, appreciated, and part of something they actually want to be a part of.

You need to understand your employees to sell them your product.

MixR thinks about employee analytics a bit differently than your average HR tech company. While we do measure things such as engagement, activity, community growth, retention, and many other things, we go beyond these “hard analytics," the empirical stuff like volume, growth, etc.

At MixR, we think that the key to understanding employees' soft needs is…well… “soft analytics."

These soft analytics are integrated within our platform to help you understand the interest make-up of your organization. In other words, you get to understand what kind of content, what subjects, what activities, or what causes are most important to your employees, and in doing so, you gain the ability to design employee experiences that are tailored, more effective, and that will help you attract, retain and engage top talent.

How could we possibly find the resources to provide such tailored experiences?

Federalize cultural ownership.

Yes, controlling everything is most people’s first instinct, it feels like managing risk, but in reality, centralizing control of your company culture rarely translates into controlling the outcomes at scale, and most often, will simply ensure lower rates of employee satisfaction and a higher turnover. The reason for that is simple: you can’t please everyone with a one-size-fits-all employee experience , especially in this age where personal identities reign supreme. However, what you can do is share some of the cultural ownership of your company with employees . And, in doing so, empower them to build multiple poles of experiences that will each answer some of the more specific needs and interests that your employees may have.

What you need is a platform that gives your employees the ability to build communities that answer these soft needs, that empowers all of them to find, join, and engage with these communities, and that tells you what your people need, what they are interested in, and helps you figure out what to do next.

Luckily, that’s exactly what MixR does :) Visit www.mixr.net to learn more.