Breaking Through The Traditional Approach To Employee Engagement And Retention

To start with, let's understand the traditional concept of employee engagement; Any activity which helps people to be associated with companies’ objectives/goals is known as employee engagement.

What has changed Post COVID??

Has it been one-to-one employee interaction? Or the interpersonal relationship among the employees? Or both??

The answer is both. Hence, the post COVID approach of engagement has changed to a drastic level, let’s understand how??

The word Employee Engagement in traditional norms was generic and focused on increasing peoples’ participation in companies' benefit and growth.

With the new plethora of work dynamics; the concept of Employee Engagement has been more centric.

To start with, for any engagement activity, companies need to have a clear objective or “set objectives” in Mind. Employee engagement highly depends on those “Set Objectives” by the team of Management.

With the recent transitions in the work culture also known as post-COVID-19 Impact organizations have gone through a turmoil of cultural change. These changes have impacted the DNA or core values of organizations on a deeper level which has resulted in less retention, less belongingness of employees.

As it is well said, "The greatest disruptions of time have always given greater purpose to excel", the post COVID impact has let HR leaders think differently on set approaches of engagement. Although, the highest considerations have always been occupied by the transition of work practices on E-platforms and moving operations remotely. Eventually, even the engagement has shaped up with modern business norms of operations.?

Human needs human and humor to survive – Companies' retention highly depends on the interpersonal relationship that they built with co-workers working in the same culture and work environment, it mostly harvests the relations between them, hence, companies need to build and harvest such relations by constantly organizing team building activities.

Let’s understand how companies can incorporate engagement as a core value for survival. It starts with set objectives for Engagement activities. Let’s consider a few activities which can build interpersonal relationships among the employees working remotely

1.????????Group Engagement Activities: if any company is facing challenges of less interaction among the employees they need to invest and innovate ways which bring in employee/team communication -Activities which can be done in small groups, or by using breakout rooms such as Case study, Solving murder mystery, Escape rooms, puzzles and other competitive games.

?

2.????????Shared Hobbies Group- let’s say, you have a music band working with you. Someone who sings well, someone who can play the flute, someone who can play a keyboard. What could be best than a Rockstar performance by this band??Or let’s say an art exhibition of some of your artist employees, this will not only motivate employees to pursue their interests but will also help them to share knowledge among similar interest groups. HR leaders can invest and put across a standard practice to group people of similar interests and can cultivate hobbies for like-minded employees.

?

3.????????Frequent Picnics and Outings- Companies can increase the number of times they are outing, mostly it's organized once a year, which could be moved to twice or thrice a year. This shall help employees to energize and bounce back to WFH more proactively and positively.

?

4.????????Workshops- Skill workshops that are less related to your job but more towards the art of survival; For example, a workshop on how to maintain your car or basics of painting or how to be a professional photographer.

?

5.????????Communication- Management needs to deliberately break the ice with new employees who have joined them in or post covid virtually by frequently having one-to-one sessions with them. A lot of time needs to be invested by HR leaders on how to smooth the communications with individuals, few approaches like; Chit-chat with HR, conversation over tea can be utilized to break the ice.

?

6.????????A Talking Pyramid- This activity is indirect yet fun. What you need to do is; put a challenge among employees to be the best among the co-workers who know maximum about/her co-workers. As you are adding more and more co-workers you know to your hat, you are becoming popular in the end.

?

7.????????The Fun Calendar- Any good practice started in the group has a higher chance of completion. An event calendar is one such activity. ?Present a 30-day activity event calendar to employees which can consist of small day to day activities such as cooking, cleaning plates, gardening, reading books, doing yoga, all you need to do is keep track of challenges that employees can accomplish by the end of the month.

?

These are a few inputs and suggestions that if worked upon can rebuilt the engagement in the organization for better retention and participation.