Employee engagement is an absolutely important measure of any organization in 2021. There were days when many organizations were reluctant to give an individual room to employee engagement. As a result, they used to suffer from poor employee retention rate, high turnover, lack of a talent pool, less quality work, improper work culture, and environment, and so many other issues. But today’s organization owners are smart and they treat employee engagement as an important thing that ensures the growth and success of the organization. Many opinions are there about employee engagement ideas that will be effective this year and have the same effectiveness in the future days. But which ideas are actually going to help you out you have to find out. No one else can predict that for you. You can get some ideas and after that, you have to prepare your own employee engagement plans or strategies.
What is this employee engagement?
Employee engagement is nothing but a super effective workplace method designated to improve each employee’s feelings and emotional attachment to the organization, role, position, responsibilities, fellow employees, and the organization culture. Today’s HR departments are more powerful as they can deploy truly effective employee engagement ideas with the help of an employee performance management software system. In this way, they directly boost the well-being and productivity of all employees working in an organization.
When it comes to managing employee engagement, HR executives and managers include a lot of measures, approaches, initiatives, and so on. They combine all these things in order to rightly motivate all employees so that they can become more productive and successful in their individual levels.
Employee engagement in HR is there to ensure each employee is truly committed to the organization and doing the best in order to achieve the mission, goals, and values of the organization. This is the process to keep employees motivated and make them able to contribute to the overall success of the business organization.
What does employee engagement mean in HR?
Along with the human resource department, all other departments of an organization should execute various effective employee engagement measures. But we can see that the HR department is specifically vital for employee engagement approaches. This department is there to make employee engagement goals successful while enjoying many other benefits such as increased productivity, increased employee retention rate, employee loyalty, and so on. When it comes to employee engagement in HR, we can see that the human resource department has five key roles to perform. Let’s explore those key roles below-
Executive leadership- in order to improve employee engagement, the HR department of any leading organization takes an executive leadership role. Here they identify as well as invest time in searching for effective as well as unique employee engagement tactics. Here, the HR department also needs to ensure the required transparency while making each employee understand what the organization expects from his/her.
Employee engagement- when it comes to employee engagement, HR executives and managers do some research and in-house survey in order to understand what best drives employee engagement in that organization. From designing measures to measuring the results- they do everything in order to ensure that the taken measures are effective enough to boost the employee engagement rate in an organization.
Training- It is not that only HR executives and HR managers are responsible for boosting the employee engagement rate of an organization. It is a task that each department manager and team leader should take part in. Here, HR managers train and guide department managers in order to make them understand how they can better engage their staff. HRs will help in many ways to find out what drives the engagement rate of a particular team. An organization can run with multiple employee engagement ideas and measures if that organization has lots of departments and offers various types of services and products.
Engagement activities- in order to boost the employee engagement rate, HRs design some measures that must include enthusiasm, excitement, and inspiration. HR introduces, implements, and organizes various employment activities that make each employee perform better. The contribution of each employee to the organization increases by a jaw-dropping level if the HR department can design the engagement activities properly after conducting in-house research and surveys.
Measurement- This is the last step or role that HRs need to check to ensure that the Employee engagement ideas are working fine or not. This role is known as the measurement of Employee engagement ideas’ effectiveness. In order to measure and get accurate results, HR executives and managers conduct regular surveys, department-wise check-ins, one-to-one communication and feedback collection, and so on. They do everything in order to measure the effectiveness of the employee engagement ideas that they have deployed to ensure the overall growth of an organization.
Now we can say that employee engagement in HR means that all required measures have been taken in order to make all employees feel truly engaged as well as empowered. In this way, employees will be ready to offer their best productivity levels and that is very much required in order to ensure the growth of any organization.
Now we know how and when engagement ideas can be deployed. But which ideas are going to actually help that we have to identify now. You know that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the workplace scenario has changed nearly in all ways. The majority of employees are working from home. So, the employee engagement ideas will be different from now as we are going through an unknown phase or challenge. So, let’s check out below, which employee engagement ideas are going to actually help organizations during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Best employee engagement ideas for during and after COVID-19 days
Before we go deeper into the discussion of the best employee engagement ideas, we should accept that the remote working style is going to be mainstream soon. And that’s why we should prepare strategies that will give a separate room to the remote employees or consider the remote work properly. Along with ideas, we should empower our employees with specific project management, HR management, video conferencing, and collaboration tools. Without these things, no employee engagement idea is going to bring you the desired benefits during and after the COVID-19 pandemic days.
- Engaging onboarding- after recruitment, this is the first and most important role that HRs perform. The employee onboarding should be attractive. This is the first step where you can impress your newly hired staff and give them reasons to stay in your organization for a longer span of time. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, recruitment is happening virtually. In the same way, onboarding will be virtually too.
For effective and hassle-free virtual onboarding, you should start with equipping the newly hired ones with the required digital tools, software applications, ESS, and so on. With the help of video conferencing, the employee can be introduced to the department. The HR can deliver the required information in order to clear all confusion or queries that newly hired employees generally have about their new workplace. Nowadays, HRs and employers are offering employee self-service portals so that employees can perform some effective activities on their own such as document upload, bank details add, and so on. Apart from this, the ESS portal lets employees explore more about the organization and it creates a better work environment with added transparency.
- Spice up the virtual work environment- You know that your employees are working far from each other. The fun and the quality time they used to spend together, they are simply missing that due to the remote work style. They may feel lonely and disconnected. And it can directly affect their productivity and quality of work. Moreover, the pandemic has caused enough stress for each human being on this planet. In such a situation, HRs should deploy creative as well as effective employee engagement ideas such as they can spice up the virtual work environment.
They can have facetime, online quiz games, rewards, coffee meetings, food treats, and so on. HRs may need to go some miles extra in order to arrange all these things and make the virtual work environment truly engaging for each of the employees of the organization.
- Celebrate your people- Today’s organization realizes that employees value much more than their accomplishments at work. Being the HR or an employer, you should not miss a single opportunity to celebrate and reward your employees. It helps them to stay motivated as well as energized while performing for you. From employee birthday celebrations to promotion celebrations- you should do everything now. Maybe you are celebrating virtually, still, you should do that. Employees are working alone from their homes and you should not lose any opportunity to make them happy during this pandemic situation.
- Do proper strength assessment- on a regular basis, the HR department should conduct a strength assessment survey. Here, each employee should take part in. In order to know the overall strength of the organization, measuring the strength of each employee is important. Employee strength assessment is known as one of the most effective employee engagement ideas. In this way, an organization will be able to understand which employees are good at what and what are their weaknesses.
These strength assessment data sets are going to help organizations prepare effective performance management strategies. You know that effective performance management strategies help organizations in boosting overall productivity. So, we can say that strength assessment is not only one of the most effective employee engagement ideas but also effective in preparing effective performance management strategies.
- Ask for employee advice- from the above employee engagement idea, you will find that each of your employees comes with unique strengths. Those strengths can help HR managers and the owner to take the organization to the next level. This is a modern approach of empowering an organization that many organizations are continuing even during this pandemic.
When you will ask for employee advice or feedback, you will make them know that you know about their strengths and you do appreciate that. Before enabling any new policy or change, you can discuss it with them. Not only managers will be taking part in your decision-making procedure but also each employee will be a part of that. In this way, they will feel that you are not imposing anything without their consent- you are deploying something that will ensure the growth of both employees and the organization.
You should get feedback on a regular basis and analyze everything, and only after that, you will be able to take the right decision. When you will ask for employee advice, you will make them feel truly valued and you will get new and stunning ideas that can actually help you to take your organization to the next level.
These are the best 5 employee engagement ideas that will help many organizations during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is also evident that all these ideas will work only when you will equip your employees with the best technologies at the same time. In order to perform all the mentioned tasks above, your HR department team should get a truly effective cloud-based remote HR management software system such as HRMWARE. This is a stunning cloud-based SaaS product that comes with all the best features including an employee self-service portal.
HRMWARE is a complete HR management software system that can be accessed remotely. Each employee of your organization will be able to access this solution without facing any kind of hassle. There is no need to install any additional software or hardware solution in order to use HRMWARE. Just a browser is enough to make you enjoy all its stunning benefits. From attendance management to payroll management- you can literally do every human resource management task including employee engagement with the help of this great software solution created by Vyrazu Labs.
It is also free for organizations that are running with up to 10 employees. We believe in powering each other to take the industry to a better position tomorrow!