Productivity vs. efficiency. Both are important metrics in any business. While often used interchangeably, there are key differences between the two, and neither is complete without the other. True productivity takes efficiency into account, and vice versa. This post explains productivity vs. efficiency and shows you how to combine them in analyzing business performance.

According to Gartner, a staggering “91% of HR Leaders are concerned about employee turnover in the immediate future.” With recent changes to the labor market — we’re looking at you Covid-19 and The Great Resignation — this statistic isn’t surprising. What’s more surprising is that employee retention isn’t as tough to improve as you might think.

When we “wear a lot of hats” at work, that means we have multiple jobs to do, depending on what’s needed at the moment. In today’s modern workplace, many of us ‘wear a lot of hats’ with pride, showing off our versatility and talent, solving a myriad of challenges, and making it look effortless. But it isn’t really effortless, is it? Quite often, multiple hat-wearers are stretched pretty thin. One often-misunderstood department is internal communications (IC).

The digital employee experience (DEX) spans the entirety of an employee’s interactions with their digital workplace — new employee onboarding, managing healthcare benefits, company newsletters, employee engagement surveys, project management dashboards, and more. So, why are companies making so many mistakes with its design? We have answers.

According to Gallup, the U.S. employee engagement slump continues. The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees has been falling consistently since 2019, hitting a recent low in 2022 of just 1.9 to 1. For every 19 engaged employees who are out there giving a company their all, another 10 are actively working to undermine those efforts. On the surface, it might sound like the balance is in favor of engagement. After all, there are almost two engaged employees for every disengaged one.

Subscribers to our blog and podcast series know that Simpplr strives to share tips, tricks and best practices for connecting workforces all across the globe. And subscribers also recognize that this connection significantly impacts ROI. But, how does one prove this to be true? Well, we’re coming in hot with our latest helpful offering – How to Get the HR Resources You Need, By Showing Leadership the ROI They Want—In 5 Steps.

Some people call them the “Sunday Scaries.” It’s that feeling in your stomach when you realize it’s Sunday night, House of the Dragon is over, and now you have to face the prospect of starting a new work week. You try to shake it off, realizing that wallowing in the same emotions every Sunday you used to feel on the last day of summer vacation is not only pointless but counterproductive. Monday, like Winter, is coming.

As humans, we can learn from everything. Lessons about the human experience are everywhere if you’re open to them. If you’re a lover of nature like me, you know that it has a lot to teach us. In oceans worldwide, pods of humpback whales form veritable choirs, singing a unison song at 188 decibels. That’s louder than the roar of a jet plane flying only 100 feet away. But we humans, limited by our audio perception and utter lack of the whale’s use of language—pay no mind.

Last quarter, we shared some amazing features with new hire onboarding and an upgraded newsletter offering––setting the bar for personalization enhancements. Keeping with that theme, Jackson, the Simpplr Fall ‘22 release, showcases a much-anticipated slate of new personalization capabilities designed to help organizations prioritize the employee experience.

Let’s be honest: the workplace isn’t what it used to be. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, computers do make a lot of things easier. And not all old tech is gone — many people still use pagers to this day. But the dictaphone? The dot matrix printer? The teletype? Gone, never to return. The march of modern technology has been swift and merciless.

There’s a difference between feeling tired and feeling burned out. You can overcome “tired” with a cup of coffee, an afternoon walk, or a good night’s sleep. Employee burnout, unfortunately, is a different animal. In 1974, psychologist Herbert Freudenberger published an early paper on staff burnout at a free medical clinic in Manhattan’s East Village.

The situation is tense in many companies these days, particularly in tech. The Great Resignation; budget and workforce cutback, and the overall financial crises that many are facing have combined to create the perfect storm for HR. The burden is real––and heavy. And it’s time to offer some relief with equitable solutions.

Did you know we drink 517 million cups of coffee every day in the U.S.? Those 3.1 cups per person add up to one whopper of an industry. And it’s no surprise who’s at the top of the coffee game: Starbucks. But there’s an alternate timeline out there with no pumpkin spice lattes. One where CEO Howard Schultz didn’t return to the helm in 2008 to turn the company around in the wake of store closings, widespread layoffs, and a significant drop in share price. How did he do it?

Stephanie Briggs, director of employee experience at Ivanti, knows what it takes to provide the ideal employee experience. Storytellers are a special breed of people who understand the nuance of communication and the sacredness of words. They comprehend how people may need to hear messages in various ways to grasp a story’s essence and inner meaning. You’re a lucky company when you have such an individual leading your employee experience.

If you have seen the movie Office Space (1999), you know all about pointless TPS reports, impossible-to-understand printer instructions, (“PC Load Letter”), and micromanaging superiors. Office Space was an office comedy, so the portrayals were a little extreme. But who can’t relate to the annoyances of working in an office, even if we work remotely?

There’s no question that we’re living in turbulent times, and workers are leaving their jobs for new ones in droves. In January 2020, just before the pandemic hit, the World Economic Forum predicted that rapid technological changes would transform nearly half of all core skill sets within two years. But two years later, it turned out that the technological shift wasn’t the cause of the so-called “Great Resignation,” but mindset and attitudes about work.

When you’re living in the middle of a workplace revolution, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees, especially if you’re a Millennial who grew up with technology — literally. Born between 1981 and 1996, Millennials ranged from eight to twenty-three when Facebook was first released on the Harvard campus in 2004. (Yes, Facebook is that young.) After that, more social networks followed: Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, and now TikTok in 2016.