Looking for Substantial Growth in 2022? Start by Understanding your Workforce EQ

We’re all familiar with IQ, or your intelligence quotient. But numerous studies—and lots of anecdotal evidence—show that your emotional intelligence (often called EQ) is just as critical to your success in life as any intellectual measure. 

Despite these findings, many companies don’t give much thought to the emotional intelligence of their overall workforce. That’s a big mistake, because your workforce EQ is vital to positioning your organization to attract and retain the talent you need to achieve your aggressive growth goals.

If you’re looking to grow substantially in 2022 and beyond, it’s essential to assess and understand the emotional intelligence of your workforce and ensure your culture and work environment are prepared to attract and keep the talent you need to thrive.

How is Your Workforce Feeling? 

If you’re running hard and fast to fill many open positions—perhaps to expand into new markets or launch a new product—getting a pulse on your workforce may not be high on your priority list. Understanding how your workforce is feeling and what they’re thinking tends to take a back seat to issues that seem more pressing in the moment, like operationally focused projects and tasks.  

Instead, company leaders often make assumptions about how their employees are feeling about their roles, as well as their expectations, values, challenges, and pain points. But making assumptions is never prudent, especially with something as complex as emotions. It leaves you flying blind when it comes to questions like these:

• Does your team have the capacity and the will to overcome any challenges your organization is currently facing?
• Are there growing pains that your aggressive plans have inadvertently created, which your team isn’t able or willing to work through?
• Are your leaders feeling confident and equipped to manage employees who are now working remotely or in a hybrid environment? 
• Are your employees who work remotely feeling sufficiently engaged and connected to the organization?  

If you plan to hire aggressively, and your workforce EQ isn’t particularly strong, you could end up bringing new employees in the front door while your tenured employees walk out the back door. So, before you launch into a period of rapid growth and high-volume hiring, you may need to do some housekeeping to ensure your new hires have a positive experience that encourages them to stay on board. Otherwise, you risk losing the very talent you’re spending time, energy, and budget to recruit. Sadly, M3 has seen companies with departure rates that exceed their hire rates.

Given the high cost of replacing an employee—estimated at 1 ½ to 2 times their annual salary—no organization can afford high turnover. And if you hope to achieve substantial growth this year, you have even less capacity to weather this problem. It’s like trying to ice the cake while it’s still baking; you don’t have a solid foundation to build on. Yet high-growth companies are particularly prone to overlooking the EQ of their workforce. They’re often so busy filling a high volume of open positions that they focus less on their churn rate, what’s causing it, or how to solve it.  

Why It’s Complex to Assess the EQ of Your Workforce

Getting an accurate idea of how your workforce is feeling and what they’re thinking is essential to a growing, thriving organization. Yet, it’s complex to assess. 

Many companies rely almost exclusively on surveys to assess their workforce’s EQ, but most survey instruments can’t accurately gauge the range or depth of emotions within your workforce. That’s especially true now, two years into a pandemic that has challenged all of us emotionally, mentally, and physically at a level that is unprecedented in recent times.   

Based on the mass movement of talent from one job to another, it’s clear that many of the recruitment and retention approaches of the past aren’t working in the new normal. That’s why M3 developed a unique service designed to help an organization get an accurate pulse on its workforce, identify opportunities to better address employees’ needs and challenges, and ultimately improve employee retention.

How M3’s Workforce EQ Can Help    

M3 launched Workforce EQ to help organizations go beyond assumptions or basic surveys and get a more accurate, in-depth understanding of the challenges, issues, wants and needs of the talent they rely on to achieve their business goals—and reduce the odds that they’ll leave for what they perceive as a better work environment. 

When you consider that three out of four employee resignations could have been prevented (per a Work Institute study), the ability to gauge how your workforce is feeling, what they’re experiencing, and what they need to be productive and fulfilled is critical to maintaining the staff you need to grow and thrive. 

Workforce EQ can help your organization:

• Understand what is really happening inside the company, beyond what you can see on the surface or glean from a survey
• Uncover positive aspects of your work environment, find ways to replicate them in other areas of the organization, and promote them in interviews and onboarding
• Instill trust and confidence in your workforce by making it clear you’re genuinely interested in their wants, needs, and feelings
• Determine what your employees need from the organization to do their jobs more effectively and with greater passion
• Maximize the return on your recruitment investment by reducing costly, disruptive staff turnover 

Why M3’s Workforce EQ is Different

Workforce EQ enables an organization to dig deeper than the techniques traditionally used to assess how employees are feeling and what they’re thinking. 

• Professionals with extensive experience in HR, employee and leadership development, and organizational design lead the engagement.
• We take a third-party, objective view—going beyond the preconceived notions and internal biases that can skew assessments conducted by internal teams. 
• We talk with C-suite leaders first to understand what they think about the emotional component of their workforce—then use qualitative interviews with employees to determine any gaps between their experiences and their leaders’ perceptions.
• We use techniques that uncover a greater depth of information than surveys can obtain, asking probing questions that get employees talking candidly.  

The results of this process give organizational leaders the information they need to make improvements that will keep employees productive, satisfied, fulfilled, and more likely to stay on board. It also identifies how leaders can improve their own EQ to better serve the staff members who rely on them for guidance and direction.  

If you run a high-growth company and plan to accelerate your hiring, the advantages of gauging your workforce’s EQ are even more significant. You’ll know what you need in place to create an environment that new hires want to join and that tenured staff don’t want to leave. You’ll avoid the common problem of ramping up hiring on the front end only to see existing staff depart on the back end. And you’ll be able to recruit and retain a workforce that’s ready and equipped to bring your growth plans to fruition. 

Learn how M3 and its Workforce EQ solution can help your high-growth company meet your aggressive goals by retaining the top talent you need to grow and thrive. Contact us to schedule an introductory call today!