What Employees Really Want: Five Essentials for Workplace Satisfaction

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Hey everyone. Welcome to another five-minute leader. And today I want to talk about the five things, ironically, five five minute leader, the five things your employees care about most. As you know, or probably maybe you know, I'm working on a new employee experience book. I'm interviewing 100 Chief Human Resource Officers around the world. This book will come out next year, in the summer of 2025 or thereabouts.

One of the things that I am really fascinated by from a lot of these conversations that I'm having is that CHROs are trying to give a lot of things to their employees. Now, this happened during the pandemic. Post-pandemic, a lot of mental health, well-being programs, and all that. We’re past that now, right? So a lot of CHROs are trying to figure out what perks, benefits, and well-being programs they need to be throwing at their employees.

I want to give you some very counterintuitive, or kind of a counter viewpoint to this, and tell you that your employees only care about five things. If you get rid of every well-being, every engagement program, and everything else that you have and just do these five things, you would be doing better than pretty much every other company in the world. So, what are these five things that employees care about?