Employee engagement and its subtle correlation with data security

Recent news about recession especially among the big tech giants may have most employers thinking about employee engagement in their company. This article focusses on varied ways of employee engagement and the subtle correlation with data security.

So what exactly is employee engagement ?

Employee engagement is not a new concept really. A highly engaged workforce can reduce absent co-workers, increase productivity and improve customer satisfaction amongst a bunch of other things. Back in 2014 the buzzword used was company 'culture' which has now evolved to the term 'employee engagement'. Quoting from peopleG2

If employees are happy, they tend to work harder and stay longer at a company, even forgoing raises to stay at a place where they feel valued.

The illustration below from the same article indicates the various qualities that go into employee engagement. It clearly shows that an engaged employee is one who is fully committed to his/her work, self motivated, can be trusted , is loyal to his / her company and is one who is enthusiastic about the opportunity.

How does recession impact employee engagement ?

The post pandemic recession has lead to several business challenges. Companies have slowed down hiring and in some cases are letting workers go. When employees are uncertain about their future, what happens to employee engagement? This question has been answered in varied ways. Some folks model the task based approach and focus on the task on hand and not worry about the future. This may also be considered analogous to the productivity model where an individual occupies his/her mental space with the immediate tasks on his/her plate and continues to execute on them without letting external factors affect the flow of work.

According to a 2006 Gallup study,?Feeling Good Matters in the Workplace,?there are three types of employees.

• Engaged employees (28%) work with passion and feel a profound connection to their companies. They drive innovation and move the organisation forward
• Not-engaged employees (54%) are essentially “checked out.” They’re sleepwalking through their workday, putting time—but not energy or passion—into their work
• Actively disengaged employees (18%) aren’t just unhappy at work: they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

Gallup has conducted survey around these metrics since 2000 as illustrated. A snippet from the Gallup results, clearly shows that it is not a very happy state.

So let us look into ways an organisation can promote / improve engagement.

Natural promoters of engagement: Enhancing engagement starts with employees. You have to recognise that your business is made up of individuals with differing needs, aspirations, and motivations. Few techniques on how to adjust your approach to engagement and get to know your team better have been beautifully described here:

• Disrupt your traditional patterns: These techniques typically involve recognising not only the most vocal but also the ones who are more quiet, and creating a fair distribution of work to ensure everyone has an opportunity to grow.
• Focus on talent fit: You typically want the right person for the right role. If you are uncertain of alignment it is best to ask upfront.
• Engage the whole person: The work / life balance theory sounds good but quite hard for most people to do. Engage the whole person by trying to connect on a more human level, without delving into too much personal details. Sometimes fun activities help to bring the team together at various times.

AI techniques: The world of AI plays a very important role in determining employee engagement metrics and modelling around them. As generations change in the workforce, the trends, tools, and solutions to engage and retain employees and measure their engagement levels are also changing. Quoting

while baby boomers and Gen X consider face-to-face conversations the most efficient way of communication, millennials and Gen Z are more interested in how digital engagement tools could revolutionize how they work and engage with others.

AI algorithms can monitor employees’ performance in real-time and highlight improvement areas. Furthermore techniques like sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP) of the text conversations can determine their mood at work and predict their performance. AI helps modernise HR processes — from onboarding and conflict management to learning and career development — often saving you from manual labor.?

So where does security play a role in all of this ?

When one thinks of data security and employee engagement, it can, at first, be difficult to see the correlation. They seem like two very different aspects of doing business. But the truth is, they are actually connected in some interesting ways. With organisations harvesting data about employees to understand their productivity they are essentially tapping into highly sensitive information about an individual. Employees may be sharing everything from their daily moods to how they relate to their boss. Therefore, this is data that requires protecting under the GDPR because it is so personal in nature. The figure below illustrates how such data should be collected to ensure security and privacy guidelines are followed.

Always keep ethics and transparency top of mind in the employee data collection, sharing, and analysis process. Err on the side of being overly protective of this data rather than being casual about things.?

Having written so much about employee engagement, would like to leave you with one question to think about:

Food for thought: What is the one thing/person/benefit/activity you'd love to come to work for regardless of pay ?