Employee Confidence

Employee Confidence is an action-focused, performance oriented construct that can be used to forecast and enhance the success of the organization by measuring key components of the workplace environment and its individual employees. Employee Confidence is measured by asking employees about their perceptions of their organizations. There are four key areas—two related to organizational performance and two related to the individual’s personal situation within the organization.

Employees know how their organization is faring, each from their own unique perspective. No employee, including the CEO, has a comprehensive or total understanding of how the organization is doing. Collecting Employee Confidence information from the employee population represents a “group intelligence.” Employees can shed light on organizational performance related issues, offering an accurate predictor of what is actually happening within the organization and a roadmap for organizational improvement.

Four Dimensions of Employee Confidence

Kenexa characterizes Employee Confidence in four dimensions, which represent the framework for stimulating confidence within the organization.

There are two sub-dimensions to Employee Confidence, Organizational Confidence and Personal Confidence. The internal part of Organizational Confidence focuses on the internal functioning of the organization (e.g. managed well, effective business processes and financial health). The external part of Organizational Confidence focuses on the environment in which the organization operates (e.g. industry health, competitiveness, attractiveness of products and services).

The internal part of Personal Confidence focuses on the employee’s future with his/her current employer and is the traditional driver of how employee loyalty was generated from the employee’s perspective (e.g. job security, promising future, preparation for future). The external part of Personal Confidence asks about the employee’s perception of what would happen to him/her if he/she had to go into the job market (e.g. skills would allow him/her to find a similar job with similar pay and others are hiring people with similar skill sets).

When examined within the organization, the organization as a whole, the industry in which the organization is embedded and at the country level, Measures of Employee Confidence affect and reflect:

• The employee’s own behavior
• Organizational performance
• Industry trends
• Country level macro-economic factors

Overall, Employee Confidence has been found to relate to multiple economic and business performance outcomes at the individual, organizational, industry and country levels.

Creating Employee Confidence

Given all the evidence regarding the implication of higher versus lower levels of Employee Confidence, a natural question that arises is, “What can be done to affect the levels of Employee Confidence within an organization?” The findings so far suggest that by concentrating on four key areas, an organization can impact the degree of Employee Confidence that its employees exhibit. These key areas are:

• Improving on the Way Business is Conducted
  Use the current situation as a window of opportunity to improve internal processes/relationships and tackle issues that will increase effectiveness, but have been put off, and do so in a visible/communicative fashion.
   
• Reinvigorating the Organization’s Competitiveness
  Ensure that your services/products are competitive, current and better than the competition. Understand the market and the demand for your products/services and deliver a product that will meet those needs.
   
• Providing Current Reassurance
  Assure that organizational members can thrive in the current environment, providing reassurance where possible and communicating extensively. Create an environment of fairness and equality
   
• Providing Longer-Term Alternatives
  Provide mechanisms (e.g. experiences, training) where individuals feel equipped to thrive/prosper in alternative environments to the current organization. The value proposition to employees is to provide skills and experience that equips them for life and a meaningful career, not for a specific job.