COMP NEWS – Remote work has become a fixture of the post-COVID world. But HR expert Karen Brownrigg warns that employers looking to retain their talent may be focusing too hard on new and popular benefits at the expanse of developing a holistic solution.

There is an interesting trend in job advertisements popping up today as employers grapple with the return to the office post-pandemic: It’s the new position of Chief Remote Officer.

As an HR professional, I read the descriptions with fascination. And I’ve started to see a common thread.

Each of the job postings assigned just one person in the organization the responsibility for creating a strategy for the employee experience which is focused on “all aspects of remote work.”

So, does that assume that workplace culture and the happiness of employees starts and ends with remote work?

What if employees want other things and not the desire to just work remotely? How would you know? And what if you put an expensive remote work strategy in place and your ability to recruit and retain your employees isn’t improved? It may be very costly to try recovering from that mistake.

Brownrigg warns that boiling the responsibility of overseeing employee experiences to just one role or one manager can create blind spots that affect an organization’s employee retention.

Since when did the employee experience become the responsibility of just one person?

Too narrow a focus limits the organization’s ability to see different points of view. Sloughing things off to a Chief Remote Officer is a missed opportunity. Wouldn’t you want your leadership team to play a role in the strategy? If you want them to stick around, they need to have skin in the game.

If your organization loses just one experienced team member, the cost of hiring and onboarding a new employee could run as high as three-times the departed employee’s salary. That’s assuming you can find someone whose experience is the same as the person who left.

Understanding how to create a personalized connection between an employee and their workplace arguably cannot be done effectively without inviting different perspectives into the dialogue.

It’s in our best interest to find creative ways to give employees what they want, and we all have a part to play in contributing our perspectives and ideas about how to go about it.

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