Employee engagement is complicated

It’s not just the fun stuff or communicating important aspects about an organization or how employees can contribute. It’s a lot more. Why don’t you read on for more?

Employee engagement is almost everything and more! It includes communication, initiatives, behaviors, policies, processes, practices, compensation and benefits, how managers and leaders engage with employees and how they also collaborate with one another – as teams or as individuals.

Engagement is what I call a ‘Touchpoint’ focused model or a program. It includes every form of interaction an employee has in every possible way with an organization – systems, platforms, mediums and people. You simply can’t isolate one form the other, as each of them have a domino effect on another.

More than ever before, we live in an age of hyper-personalization, making engagement more granular and complex. Each employee is different and unique, while there may be common pain points or issues to deal with, their degree varies.

Not just HR or communications, managers and leaders need to think about engagement on a broader level, but every functional head – operations, finance, safety, compliance etc.

An analogy that comes to mind is ‘Every drop makes an ocean’. We can’t ignore the how each interaction of an employee with the organization’s ecosystem can impact the employee experience. This in essence is true ‘inclusiveness’.

Each of the function needs to think, how can we make it easier and more understandable for employees to do what they are supposed to do. Examples include:

-?How can the finance department make pay slips more visually, easy to comprehend or perhaps more information (cumulative salary and deduction for the year or net employee and employer contribution to a provident fund). Other examples include how simple we can make it for employees to change their variable portion of their salary online, may be an app? Or for that matter communicating financial health of the organization

-?Safety and quality are generally not taken seriously. It always appears to be someone else’s’ responsibility. But we know for a fact, its not correct. How can we make topics such as safety and quality more pertinent and relatable to employees so that we influence desired behaviors to take more individual ownership

-?When it comes to HR related topics such as performance appraisals, R&R, visibility and leadership pipeline, one needs to put effort, to recognize the employee’s point of view. There is always an opportunity to make the experience more positive, fair and transparent. Managing underperforming employees is also something that needs to be addressed with care and provide employees a way to enhance their own capabilities and contribution. How about making onboarding shorter and more personalized, as against mass teams attending lectures on a daily basis

-?One last example to reiterate my point is that of trending topics and thought leadership. Before we speak out in the open, topics of organization interest must be first communicated effectively to employees first. This is being truly ‘inclusive’. Imagine hearing about your best friend’s engagement news comes from an unknown source, rather than from your best friend!

End of the day, we need to address employee engagement as a means to better the ‘employee experience’. Not the other way around.

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