Employee engagement, a HR function or strategic function driven by leadership? Why should businesses prioritise the strategic value of their teams?

Hear from Kate Innes , Chief People Officer at Vertas, who looks at why she thinks businesses need to prioritise the strategic value of their teams more and the benefits doing this will bring to your organisation.

#workforce #productivity #hr #people #business #businessoperations

All businesses rely on people. If you don’t prioritise employee engagement and you have a disengaged work force, you probably haven’t got a business for very long. So, it should be everyone’s priority.

It’s not rocket science to connect the dots between engagement and company success. We know it ourselves – when we are motivated towards a goal, we give it our best. It’s a bit like a fitness plan – when we know what we want to achieve by hard work, we go for it and push ourselves to reach our vision. As soon as we disengage from the fitness plan, we produce minimal effort and even make excuses as to why we are missing a workout.

The same is true for colleague engagement – as soon as the colleague becomes dissatisfied and de-motivated they will do the minimum required and their job satisfaction decreases. Customer service is heavily impacted as they will feel the negative vibes and the service standards will decrease significantly. Employee disengagement can also lead to health and wellbeing concerns – the person can withdraw into themselves, and accidents in the workplace can increase when people are disinterested and cut corners to get a job done quicker.

Employee retention and productivity are totally interlinked with employee engagement. The levels of colleague engagement will be influenced by the company’s culture, leadership, and the reality of whether the company lives its purpose and values. If colleague morale and engagement is decreasing, then they need to act quickly to ascertain what the driver is and consider measures to reverse it.

Employers need to pay real attention to employee engagement as it can quickly turn and have huge consequences on the success of a business. This is where the People Teams (HR function) can add so much value by having their finger on the pulse – assessing the heartbeat of employee satisfaction through various methods and metrics and reporting up when things are not going in the right direction. At this point it is over to leadership to listen and take action.

Should employee engagement sit with one team, or should it really sit with everyone? I guess how I view it is that our People Team (HR function) are the behind-the-scenes maestros who put together an employee engagement strategy and support the workings of company engagement initiatives to make sure they run smoothly. Leaders in a business are the engagement advocates who can influence the attitude toward engagement – they set the tone for their teams. If they are strong advocates of engagement, lead by example in their behaviours, and constantly drive the engagement initiatives, they build trust and working relationships with their teams, celebrating success and motivating them on the company’s purpose. This all leads to highly engaged teams.

At Vertas we’ve got many different ways we engage with colleagues – that can be social media, team meetings, continuous conversations, colleague satisfaction/ pulse surveys. It’s all about us having direct feedback from our colleagues about things we do well, things we could do more of, or things we could do differently. There will always be things we can change. We also have an employee champion group, where they meet with us every quarter with problems and solutions. Giving our colleagues the opportunity to say what’s not quite working and how we could perhaps do it differently.

In a nutshell employee engagement is everyone’s responsibility and we all have a part to play in maintaining a happy and engaged workforce.