The term employee experience (EX) has been a trending buzzword over the last few years. But what exactly does it mean? From attracting talent to onboarding your new employees, and all the way to when an employee leaves the company–the EX considers every interaction during an employee’s life cycle. This includes the employee’s role, workspace, manager relationships, and overall well-being. The EX is a golden circle that makes both employees and employers successful.

Everyone, at some point, learns the importance of constructive feedback or criticism when they need to give it to someone at work. Whether a colleague deleted that spreadsheet you worked on for three weeks or a co-worker always speaks over you in Zoom meetings, the day of reckoning will arrive. Are you ready? Do you know how to approach a sticky situation with grace?

What does a movie about baseball have to do with digital transformation strategy? If you’ve ever seen the film, Money Ball, it’s the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A‘s baseball team, who’s charged with a Herculean task—building a winning baseball team on a shoestring budget. But since he’s pretty good at math, he pioneers the field of sabermetrics—the empirical analysis of baseball stats to find players with untapped potential.

As far back as 776 B.C., Olympic athletes competed in ancient Greece for fame, honor, and glory. City-states used the Games to assert influence and importance. Do you know what the only official reward for winning in the ancient Olympics was? A crown of olive leaves. Not as valuable of an award as you might think for one of the biggest events in the ancient world. Not that we think you should reward your Employee of the Month with an olive wreath.

Whether you view email newsletters as a valuable vehicle for company-wide updates or as noise that weighs down your inbox, the fact is that email isn’t going away, and neither is using email newsletters for internal communications. If your primary method of employee communication is by email or email newsletters, you’re not alone.

The term ’digital transformation‘ is a lot like love. It means different things depending on who you ask. IBM, a long-standing technology leader, offers this mouthful: “us AI, automation, hybrid cloud and other digital technologies to leverage data and drive intelligent workflows, faster and smarter decision-making, and real-time response to market disruptions.” Still kind of nebulous, huh?

Simpplr partnered with Ragan Communications to explore this theme in our 3 Approaches to the Strengthening Employee Experience eBook. We see that the workplace is in a time of change and that it may never return to the way it was before. The new remote reality has been proclaimed as something that will not go away.

Simpplr is introducing an innovative Live EX platform feature to transition into a new era of Internal Communications. The new reality is that the world of internal communications is evolving. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the employee experience. Many workers found themselves isolated, and leaders had to learn to institute technological changes to cross those divides and provide clarity around organizational priorities and values.

When things go wrong at work, what’s your first instinct? To blame your people? To blame your systems and workflows? Or to get curious about what went wrong? Trusting relationships don’t jump to blame when bad things happen. Your employees know that instinctively. If you‘re quick to blame others in a crisis, it can affect teamwork throughout the organization. Now, does that mean you should blindly trust everyone in every situation? Of course not.

Have you ever seen The Office? Manager Michael Scott’s absurd ideas to boost employee engagement range from laughable to cringeworthy, but they all fail for the same reason: He has no idea how to relate to the people he works with. It’s hilarious to watch, but there’s a lesson in it too. If you want to boost employee engagement, activities and gimmicks aren’t enough. You have to start with a foundation of trust, respect, and genuine human caring.