Slack’s research leader on why employers should invest in the employee experience

Recruiting the best talent is typically a top priority for HR. Employers spend a lot of time and effort getting the right people through their doors—but what about making sure they stay there?

Christina Janzer, SVP of research and analytics at Slack, recently connected with HR Brew to discuss why organizations should focus more of their energy on employee retention.

This interview has been edited for clarity. To watch the complete conversation, click here.

What drives a great employee experience, and why should executives invest time and energy into creating a great work experience?

Oftentimes, you hear people talk about things like employee perks like free food in the office or workout classes or things like that. Those are important parts of the conversation, but I think it’s a really small part.

When I think about a great employee experience, I think about enabling people to do the best work of their careers. So, that means valuing people’s contributions, that means trusting people to do their best work, it means building connections and making sure that people feel connected to one another. It means trusting people, and it also means supporting mental and physical well-being. All of that together is what is going to ensure that people can do the best work of their lives. And that’s what’s going to accomplish great business goals. When you think of it like that, you really start to understand that a great employee experience actually really drives productivity.

What strategies are going to help companies retain their top talent?

Retaining top talent, that really starts by understanding what employees value and what’s going to enable them to do great work. My team at Slack studies what drives worker productivity and what drives that great employee experience. And we use those insights to really experiment with better ways of working internally, and then we share that with the world externally. The whole mission of this is to create a brighter future of work for everyone.

We’ve been conducting quarterly surveys of desk workers since the beginning of the pandemic, and we do this to really understand what do people value, what’s important to people? How are they going to work best? And what is it going to take to keep them enjoying their work? What we see is that feeling trusted is critical to setting employees up for success. And the kicker here is that more than one in four employees globally do not feel trusted by their employers.

What do we mean by distrust in the workplace?

Trust means a lot of different things to different people. The way that we looked at it in our survey was by specifically asking, “Does your employer trust you?”...We cut it across a number of different aspects. [Distrust is] pervasive amongst younger workers… [and] even high performers do not feel trusted. So, there’s sort of just this overall deficit of trust right now. [Going] back to what we were talking about, you spend so much time recruiting the right people, looking all over to find the perfect candidate for the role that you’re hiring for, [so] if you’re doing your job, there’s no reason that they shouldn’t join the company with full trust.

I think about this a lot as a leader, and one of my philosophies is when I hire somebody, they’re going to start with full trust. And there’s no reason for me not to default to trusting them completely. Over time, we’ll get to know each other and unless something happens, that trust is going to stay. We’re seeing this huge trust deficit right now and it’s really important to recognize that it has nothing to do with low performance, because high performers feel the exact same way.