The Covid-19 pandemic inspired many employees to reevaluate their relationship to work—and the Great Resignation forced many employers and HR teams to reevaluate their recruitment and retention strategies.

Employee experience (EX) pros say that constant feedback solicitation from employees, listening sessions, and collaborative design are the keys to creating a workplace that will attract and keep employees.

EX design—crafting the policy, programs, communications, and expectations that shape workplace culture—isn’t new, but experts say its value is growing because employees are factoring culture and experience into career longevity.

“Covid happened and that accelerated everything, but what I found in my research is that the median job tenure in terms of years across all age groups has been in sharp decline for the last 50 to 60 years,” said Jenny Busing, co-founder and co-CEO at Excellent, an EX design education platform that helps employers and HR professionals create better employee experiences. “Now you’ll see that millennials and Gen Z are just not going to work at places that have a suboptimal employee experience,” she said.

Employee experience. Busing said that it’s the everyday experience at work that “keeps people in their seats.”

“If we want to design an experience that’s going to be ideal, employees need to be part of that discussion,” Benjamin Granger, chief workplace psychologist at experience management software company Qualtrics, told HR Brew. “In a large organization where you have hundreds of thousands of people, that’s going to be done via surveys or some sort of structured listening.”

In practice. At hotel giant Hilton, employee feedback has long been a part of HR, according to Christine Maginnis, SVP of HR strategy and talent, who noted how it has shaped the company’s employee travel program, Go Hilton. Keep reading here.—AD

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When Danitza Salomé Montilla Tejada began working at garment manufacturer 99Degrees in April 2019, she did so as an office assistant before climbing the ranks to her current role in HR. She sees her work in employee engagement and development as a demonstration to employees that the company is actively investing in them and their careers.

How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR?

My position is to develop initiatives, processes, and procedures that promote employees’ development and an engaging work environment…We try to meet from time to time with employees in roundtables…where they can share their concerns, how they’re feeling, something we can improve, [or] that we’re doing good, so we can keep doing it. So, those initiatives, we promote.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?

The best change I have made at a place I’ve worked has been to show people how your voice can be heard and your opinions expressed diplomatically and with patience, how important it is to understand and respect people’s opinions without judging, and most importantly, for people to know that the HR department is not an enemy, but it is there to support the team as needed.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

Because I lead terminations, warnings, and policy enforcement, [that] I am the one responsible for [those processes]. [And] people not understanding the amount of work behind an initiative or an event, and being so critical when things do not go as perfect as expected.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

Seeing people’s happy faces when they enjoy an event, having people’s trust when they are going through a difficult moment and they consider you to be their confidant, and being able to see their happiness and relief in their face when you help them. Keep reading here.

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Earlier this week, more than 7,000 nurses in New York City went on strike after failing to reach a contract agreement with Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center. As Healthcare Brew’s Shannon Young and Amanda Eisenberg recently reported, the nurses want their employers to address, among other things, the understaffing that’s long plagued the healthcare industry.

The negotiations are coming to a head as groups of nurses in different parts of the country (and even in some areas in the UK) go on strike over working conditions, which they say have disintegrated over burnout-induced attrition and an influx of Covid-19, RSV, and flu cases—billed as the “tripledemic.”

Hospitals and health facilities across the US have struggled to fill vacancies that have been exacerbated by the pandemic as well as professionals leaving the medical field. The workforce shortages (and the costs associated with filling those open positions) have plagued hospital finances.

In New York, nearly all hospitals reported nursing positions they cannot fill, and almost half said they’ve reduced or eliminated services to mitigate the staffing challenges, according to a December 2022 survey conducted last fall on behalf of the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) and four other New York hospital associations.

Keep reading on Healthcare Brew.—SY, AE

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: 48.8% of women report feeling undervalued at work. (HR Dive)

Quote: “We’re burned out. We’re exhausted the next day.”—Doreen Chulon, a nurse at Montefiore’s neurology department, on why she’s joined the NYC nurses strike (CNN)

Read: How to manage the collective emotions of your team. (Harvard Business Review)