In today’s dynamic economy, employee engagement plays a key role. It has become more crucial during the COVID-19 days. The ways companies used to do employee engagement, as well as employee management, are changed now due to the changed market scenario caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is at the utmost time when more and more companies should concentrate on employee engagement strategy. Even if your organization has an amazing pre-COVID employee engagement strategy yet you need to redesign it in order to make everything properly future-proof. How can you do it or which strategies are going to help you in developing and sustaining employee engagement and retention, we are going to discuss that below.
What drives your employee engagement more?
An employee engagement report in 2019 says that major drivers of employee engagement are, directly and indirectly, related to the company and its senior leaders. The entire engagement strategy includes a lot of factors such as company culture, work environment, benefits and compensation, trust of senior leaders, and so on. So, here we can easily say that employee engagement effort should start at the top level of any organization. From time to time senior or responsible leaders should bring the required changes in order to improve employee experience and that will definitely result in increased employee engagement.
Before exploring the ways how managers can easily and effectively impact employee engagement, we should understand the value of employee engagement. Why employee engagement has become one of the major concerns of today’s organizations- we should explore that before knowing the ways of boosting employee engagement.
Why should you concentrate on employee engagement?
Employee engagement comes with a lot of benefits that simply take an organization to the next level of growth and profitability. We must agree that the employee base is the strongest pillar of any organization. And that’s why we should do everything possible to make the pillar stronger and competent enough.
Increased employee engagement rate includes a lot of benefits to an organization regardless of size and type. You know that employee engagement is the utmost strength of the mental, as well as emotional connection employees, feel about their workplace. So, let’s take a tour at the list of benefits the right employee engagement can bring to your organization-
Added employee safety- engaged employees remain truly connected to their workplaces and aware of the surroundings. Research shows that if employees are truly engaged, organizations will face 70% fewer safety-related incidents. Instead of focusing on how the boss feels about each individual, employees will be engaged with each other and concentrate more on the tasks at hand.
Improved employee health- The same research also says that engaged employees are more immune and have overall good health in comparison with employees who are not connected at their workplaces. The study says that engaged employees are less likely to be obese, suffer from chronic disease, and so on. They remain active and prefer to enable a healthier food style along with the required amount of exercise. How have all these become possible?
Engaged workplaces offer more care for employees’ needs and growth. In order to make this thing possible, organizations are offering flexible work schedules, holistic benefits, and so many other things. And all these are contributing to improved employee health.
More satisfied and happy employees- highly engaged organizations do not need to prepare strategies to control peer pressure, termination, and high-stress behavior in order to motivate their employees. Instead of spending time on these things, engaged organizations can concentrate on other better areas such as employee recognition, one-on-one meetings, and offer 360-degree feedback to their employees. These things are truly important for ensuring the growth of any organization.
Happy and satisfied employees actually save their employer’s money and deliver more quality work in order to take the organization to a better stage. The American Psychological Association says that every year the United States has to face $500 billion loss due to the workplace stress of the employees.
Lower absenteeism- when employees are truly engaged with their workplace, they think more about the success of their teams and the projects. They become more responsible automatically. In order to ensure the successful completion of any project, they perform their work amid lots of distractions. I mean they offer the first priority to their work. When employees are truly committed and determined to achieve the organizational goals, automatically organizations face reduced absenteeism.
Higher employee retention- If your employees are not getting the required scopes to utilize their strengths, don’t feel challenged, and do not enjoy the work, they are going to leave your organization soon. When an employee leaves, the employer faces a lot of problems as he/she starts with stage one of recruitment and a production gap takes place automatically.
But if you can keep your employees truly connected, you are more likely to enjoy an increased employee retention rate. With old employees accelerating the pace of any project becomes easier while with new employees training and onboarding require a lot of time and the project completion pace becomes slow.
Amazing employee loyalty- It is not that if an employee is not searching for any job change, he/she will not leave your organization. The market is filled with competition and every organization is in the race of creating a better talent pool. So, if an attractive opportunity comes, a lot of employees will not delay accepting that offer unless they are truly engaged and committed to your organization.
We have seen that employee engagement helps in retaining quality employees for a longer span of time. They remain loyal to the organization. If they are happy in serving you, they will always think about your organization before responding to any new job opportunity. It will save you from continuous recruitment and training of newly hired employees. You will be able to concentrate on the project and other important areas of your business instead of focusing on new recruitment things.
Greater productivity- when it comes to increasing the productivity level, business owners do not prefer to leave any stone unturned. There are a lot of ways that will help an organization boost overall productivity. But among all those ways, employee engagement is the most effective solution. Engaged employees prefer to deliver more quality work in order to satisfy the project requirements. They also often perform more than official hours in order to ensure the fast and successful completion of any project.
In this way, an organization gets an added level of productivity. In order to top the industry and to leave the market competitors behind, a productivity boost is an ideal solution that you can easily get via proper employee engagement of your organization.
Higher profitability- when employees are more productive, loyal, and truly connected to the organization, it is obvious that the organization will enjoy an added profitability.
Projects will be completed within the deadline with a great success score, more clients will be on the queue, and so many other benefits will be there in order to boost all the best profitability factors.
Lower turnover- You know that hiring and onboarding employees are tough tasks and require a lot of money. It is both a time and money-consuming thing. When your employees are not truly engaged with your organization, they will leave your organization early. And that’s why you have to deal with increased turnover rate and spend more time and money on new recruitment and training again and again.
But engaged employees do not leave an organization too soon. They prefer to stay in an organization for a longer span of time and as a result, the organization does not need to hire new employees on every full moon. It will save both time and money for that organization.
These are the major benefits of employee engagement that many organizations are enjoying today. The way you used to manage employee engagement in the pre-COVID days, that way may not work during the pandemic and after the pandemic. You have to re-design your employee engagement strategy now. Many organizations are pouring added labor in order to prepare the best employee engagement strategy. There are some easy ways that you can boost your employee engagement rate even if the market is facing ups and down constantly. Below, we are going to discuss that employee engagement strategy that is simply making employee engagement and management effortless than ever.
Things to consider to prepare the most effective employee engagement strategy
- Empower all your employees- we have seen that a lot of organizations help their employees only to have skills that are relevant to the current positions of their employees. It is not the best way of skill development. You should power your employees rightly so that they can have new skills to serve new positions in the near future. Such employee engagement strategy or employee development strategies help employees in both personal growth and new skill development areas. You can assess the present strengths of your employees along with weaknesses and create better employee development and employee engagement strategy that satisfy both the long-term goals of employees and the organization.
- Recognize the true heroes- employee recognition is not only about recognition gifts and certificates. It is more than that. When you can recognize your organization’s true performers and future pillars, you automatically create a better work culture.
In your employee recognition process, you have to set different recognition appreciations for different employees. In order to make all these things possible, you should investigate what makes your team feel validated and enable everything possible as soon as possible. Your recognized employees will be accepted as the best examples that will inspire other employees of your organization. You will be able to make your employees understand what you expect from them by recognizing the true performers of your organization.
- Enable constant learning and development- workforce education is truly important. Employees do not prefer to work with the same amount of knowledge that they had while joining your organization. They are serving your organization just not to get paid regularly but also at your organization to learn new things regularly. Training programs should be evaluated each year along with creating more coaching and mentorship opportunities. In this way, you will be able to let your employees enjoy both personal and professional development. If you invest in employee learning and development today, you will get more ROI in the near future for sure.
- Do consistent communication- another effective driver of employee engagement is constant communication. You should consider communication as an important factor while preparing employee engagement strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic and after. Open, honest, transparent, and two-way communication always helps find the strengths and weaknesses of all your employees and lets you prepare effective strategies for the organization.
- Generate self and other awareness- companies that perform a behavioral assessment can improve their team communication and collaboration. And these things simply help them to boost the employee engagement rate. These assessments will help employees generate self-awareness. In this way, they will easily understand how they should work to grow better and better interact with others. When they will be truly aware of their professional requirements, they will automatically do better communication and leave no stone unturned to ensure the success of their task.
These are the 5 most important things that you should consider in order to drive employee engagement in your organization. Now, all organizations are redesigning their employee engagement strategy and you too should do the same. In this way, you will be all set to grow during the pandemic and meet the market competition when the pandemic will be over. The strategy is the only thing that can make or break an organization within. So, while preparing the employee engagement strategy, you should consider all these mentioned things and power your organization in all possible ways.