How are Businesses Winning Through This 4-fold Approach?

Have you heard the story of a janitor at NASA??

During a visit to the NASA space center in 1962, President John F. Kennedy noticed a janitor carrying a broom and asked him what he was doing. To this, the Janitor replied, "I'm helping put a man on the moon."

Think about it! To most people, the janitor was just cleaning the premises. But in a way, he was contributing in his capacity to the mission and vision of NASA, by doing his "task" with complete dedication. The point here is when each and every member of the workforce believes in the brand vision, incredible things are bound to happen. To inculcate the brand image and vision into the workforce and grow with them toward the mission, the engagement of the employees is extremely necessary.

Thus, to achieve optimum employee engagement levels,?disruption?of the monotony and disengagement at the workplace is crucial.

Employee Engagement: Why Is It Needed and How It Can be Achieved?

As per a survey by Gallup, 87% of the workforce is still disengaged at work. Moreover, disengaged employees cost companies anywhere between 450 and 550 billion dollars each year. Aren't the facts alarming?

Our world is uncertain and complex. With the changing fabric of work and the workplace, businesses need to be ready to face uncertainties and evolve for the future. Thus, to optimize performance, enhance the brand, and stay ahead of the curve, organizations need to master employee engagement.

So, How can employee engagement be achieved??That too in the current age of the multigenerational workforce? The answer is, that brands need to disrupt the process-driven strategy and build a resilient workplace using a people-driven strategy. It is high time brands realize the need to create a human-centric workplace that takes care of employee engagement through design, thought leadership, innovation, and strategy.

Let's decode this further.

Design

Workplaces need to be designed not for the work to happen, but to provide the people with an experiential quality, a "work lifestyle", to make work happen. Mapping space usage and customizing it to enable the experiential quotient of day-to-day work is a small step along the way. But what matters is how the design tackles to balance the function along with the experience.

The focus is ought to be on creating?workplace experiences ?with human sensibilities placed at the center of the process.

Thought Leadership

The workplace is no longer just a space to get tasks done. While the design must focus on creating positive human interactions, there must be also conscious efforts made by business leaders to inculcate this people-first approach into the business and their brand image.

Aligning employees to the larger mission & and vision, playing to their idiosyncrasies, Neuro-diverse management modules & and effective communication are little ways in which an organization can be a step ahead in caring for the growth of employees.

A good thought process and sustainable approach toward workplace design is the first concrete step toward being thought leaders to?make a difference through design.

Innovation

Time and technology are evolving and the pandemic has taught us to evolve better, to grow resilience to reinforce our processes and systems. As leaders, while we are striving to build resilient businesses, why not start by building resilient spaces where our brands take shape?

Innovative and convenient solutions that enable the workforce to spend little time on wayfinding, office management, scheduling, etc. could add to the brain space for additional personal or professional tasks. Innovation for convenience would directly impact employee output.

Strategy

Strategy drives business and brands that wish to ride the tide and win in the new normal must first have a strategy in place. And no! This is not a tedious number-crunching strategy. All that business leaders need to do is have an employee outlook while making business decisions.?

Your workforce will drive your business. Therefore, there must be efforts to align employees with the brand mission better and empathize with their needs better. It is time to disrupt the age-old workplace dynamics and make way for a proactive, precise, and people-driven strategy; a strategy to make?workplaces future-ready .

In Conclusion

So what is the strategy to make businesses thrive better? It is to work on employee engagement. The trick is not just to make them feel heard and valued, but to actually hear them and make efforts to value them for real.