Employee Engagement

What is employee engagement?

The term employee engagement is defined as employee's mental and emotional commitment to their work, their teams, and their organization. How employees feel about their company is measured by their level of engagement. HR is appealing to employee engagement due to its immediate advantages in terms of employee retention, recruiting, job satisfaction, and happiness.

Level of employee engagement:

Employees are categorized into four main groups:

• Highly engaged employees:

Highly engaged workers have very positive perceptions of their workplace. Employees will want to stay and put out extra effort to support the organization's success if they feel a connection to their teams, love their jobs, and have favorable thoughts about it.

• Moderately engaged employees:

Employees with a moderate level of engagement have a relatively positive opinion of their company. Despite the fact that they see room for improvement, they like their company.

• Barely engaged employees:

Employees that are barely engaged have no attachment to their place of job. They typically lack desire for their job and merely put up the minimal effort necessary to survive, sometimes even less.

• Disengaged employees:

Disengaged workers have a poor impression of their workplace. They are not involved in the organization's mission, objectives, or future.

What makes employee engagement effective?

Right employee engagement tools will help the employees in doing their best work.

1) Employee Surveys:

The secret to successful employees, teams, and businesses is to engage your people. With the appropriate employee engagement tools, you can help your leaders concentrate on what counts, your managers improve as coaches, and your staff produce their best work.

Surveys on employee engagement: Employee engagement surveys conducted throughout the entire company can help you see the broader picture.

Pulse surveys: You can quickly get feedback on any subject, at any time, with Pulse surveys.

Employee Life Cycle Surveys: You may better understand what's going on at critical junctures in an employee's journey by conducting employee lifecycle surveys.

2) Tools for ongoing performance management:

Your teams require processes and resources that inspire workers to deliver their best work and enable managers to act as coaches.

Performance evaluations and one-on-one conversations: Annual performance reviews are a thing of the past; continual performance discussions are here to stay.

Worker Objectives: Goals make sure that each team and employee is aware of how they contribute to the success of the firm.

Worker Appreciation: Your staff members desire appreciation for their contributions. In reality, one of the main factors influencing employee engagement is acknowledgment.

Employee feedback: A constant feedback culture helps speed up growth on an individual, team, and corporate level.

To improve employee engagement, following are the effective strategies:

A quotation by Anne M. Mulcahy:?

How COVID-19 affected Employee Engagement:

Based on research from the Society for Human Resource Management:

• 41% of employees feel burnt out due to the effects of the pandemic.
• 35% report symptoms of depression (such as low energy, feeling like a failure, hopelessness, and lack of interest in things they used to love, difficulty concentrating).
• Only 1 in 10 of them is comfortable asking their employer or co-workers for help.
• Only 7% of them have sought the help of a psychotherapist.
• 37% did nothing for their depression-related symptoms. More than 1 in 5 workers feel their jobs are being affected in terms of personal opportunities, pay and benefits, job security and working conditions.

Absenteeism is expensive + COVID has made it even worse:

Even before the pandemic, the South African economy was losing more than 70 billion (about 2% of GDP) annually to absenteeism i.e. the employee in question was absent more frequently and for longer periods than normal in the industry.

Overall, this resulted in more than 128 million days of productive work lost per year in South Africa. Again, this was pre-COVID. These terrifying stats tell us one important thing employee engagement and wellbeing is not what it’s supposed to be.?

The impact of the pandemic placed a whole new level of pressure on South African employees, with a significant impact on their physical, mental and spiritual well-being. This impacted productivity and company bottom line.?

Quiet quitting:

Quiet quitting is a form of employee withdrawal, defiance of unequal work-life balance, and silent non-compliance. While fulfilling their job responsibilities and not necessarily rebelling, employees often adopt methods of resisting new responsibilities and avoiding extra effort beyond the standard job description. For example, these employees may decline new projects, stop volunteering for assignments, only take on simple tasks, or claim to be too busy to help their colleagues or superiors. Another term for is "silent quitting".

Ways employees prevent quit quitting:

1. Keep your workload short:

In a perfect world, employees would have predictable and constant workloads. However, the business world is chaotic and sometimes overtime is required. However, there is a difference between working overtime during busy periods and waiting for new employees to join the company, and being constantly overworked.

2. Reward your team appropriately:

The pay gap is one of the main reasons he resigns. The problem isn't necessarily that employees aren't willing to do the extra work, but that they feel the extra effort isn't worth the reward. Managers make fun of pay raises that never come or, worse, refuse to acknowledge extra work or talk about compensation instead of telling employees to “cope” or “be a team player” You may

3. Make boosting optional:

Not all employees have the same professional ambitions or want to take on additional tasks. A career change should be a two-way conversation. Instead of assuming your employees will be promoted later or ready for new challenges, test the waters and measure how they feel about expanding their roles. Please. Your team members may have a different vision of the future than you expect. Employees can be provided with additional opportunities and encouraged to take on new roles, but leadership roles, especially when given new responsibilities but lacking formal title, influence, or reward should not be forced.

4. Listen to your employees:

A quiet ending does not begin quietly. Employees often raise concerns that managers acknowledge but either do not address or simply ignore. Team members who feel that the manager is unaware of or indifferent to their problems can take action by doing nothing. Worse, these employees lose trust in their leaders.

5. Keep your boundaries:

Quitting quietly allows employees to set boundaries and prevent coworkers and bosses from interfering beyond their private time. These boundaries can be strengthened for the benefit of employees before they resort to this extreme response.

Disengaged employees:

According to Gallup, companies should have a 4:1 ratio of engaged to disengage employees to counteract the negative impact of disengaged employees. This shows that while employee engagement is not a primary focus for most organizations, it can have a greater impact than many of us realize. Exhibit less sexuality and contribute to a more negative customer experience. When employees don't feel connected to the organization, culture and morale plummet, making it more difficult to achieve corporate goals. Fundamentally, unmotivated employees can significantly impede an organization's success, or lack of success.

Research shows that unengaged employees are less likely to work hard, feel motivated, or meet expectations for their role, and cause 60% more errors and failures in job performance. In fact, 73% of actively disengaged employees are looking for a new job or opportunity. This level of indifference and substandard work could cost companies $450 billion to $550 billion in lost revenue and employee turnover annually.

How People Analytics is helping improve employee engagement?

In April 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella observed the accelerating impact of the coronavirus pandemic on businesses, saying, "We've seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months.” Two fields are reshaping the future of HR and work: Employee engagement and people analytics.

4 ways people analytics helps in employee engagement:

1. Increase employee retention:

Employee turnover is one of the biggest concerns for companies around the world, especially with layoffs high. So how do you keep the best employees? Data powered by people analytics enables HR leaders to directly address organizational weaknesses and focus more attention on the critical problem areas that are causing employees to leave. The data also enables the creation of personas that represent people who are more likely to quit their jobs. This helps HR take proactive steps in the right direction.

2. Improved employee performance:

This famous quote from Lord Kelvin is very relevant in the context of performance management: "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." It reports on employee morale and the quality and frequency of recognition flowing through the team. It can motivate managers to close underlying gaps and build on strategies that work.

Similarly, when employees have a transparent view of their contributions and actions, they become more aware of their strengths and weaknesses, which is a key performance motivator. Digital R&R platforms generate coherent insights into perceptions received and given, their frequency, and provide productivity metrics in the form of performance scorecards.

3. Improved work-life balance:

People analytics help uncover the root causes of absenteeism, lack of engagement, and poor performance, saving you the high organizational costs associated with unplanned vacations and time off. Once gaps are identified, HR can help implement employee wellness programs that focus on employee health, well-being, and overall satisfaction. It goes without saying that a better work-life balance is the best way to motivate and keep your employees motivated.

?4. Track DE&I:

Diversity, equity and inclusion have become one of the top priorities for forward-thinking organizations in recent years. Wouldn't it be ideal if you could track, measure and analyze the state of DE&I in your company? People Analytics does just that. Generate accurate and transparent data based on workforce diversity, inclusion, equity and areas for targeted improvement.?

References: