Secretes of Employees' Engagement

Market Overview

During the past few years, business and work environments were very dynamic and I can say inflation was at its highest. Disasters happened in all markets due to pandemics and lookdowns which led to a deeply negative impact on almost the entire planet.

If we took a closer look at businesses, you would see closures or at least slowing down, financial challenges, limited cash flow, downsizing, and multiple other issues. And, by looking at the employees, you can see the end of service, salary reduction, working from home, and difficulties in conducting business and gaining profits excluding a few industries that benefited from such situation.

In this situation, as a Human Resources professional, I can see a few positive sides such as now companies understand that employees can be productive working from home or remote, flexibility is actually a good thing, performance is much more important than attendance, it also helps a lot of people to understand the importance of technology and learning.

However, it also has its negative side as a large number of professional lost their job, impact on salary structure and the way some the businesses operates. And most importantly employee motivation and engagement.

?What actually is employee engagement means and why it’s important?

There is a lot of meaning to Employee engagement, as an example, it is a human resources concept to understand and describe the relationship between employee and organization. And, it also means, involving employees in the business to gain maximum productivity. However, it’s not entirely about employee satisfaction, as it’s much more complex than that.

For me, I believe the most accurate description of the “Employee Engagement” is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals.’ –?Kevin Kruse

Employee Engagement's importance is clear from its description, as it’s a form of commitment toward the organization's goal which means that employees will be more loyal, more active, and productive.

Let’s give it some statistics.

·????????Only 15% of world employees feel engaged.

·????????Only 15% of world employees feel engaged.

·????????Engaged employees are 87% less likely to resign.

·????????70% of companies worldwide have no engagement plan.

·????????64% of HR professionals agree on the importance of employee engagement. However, only 20% apply for Engagement programs in their organizations.

·????????65% of employees agreed that more recognition & engagement is equal to less job search.

·????????58% of employees wish to have a yearly engagement survey with an action plan.

·????????71% of the company’s executives agree on the importance of engagement programs.

·????????Unengaged employees make 60% more mistakes.

·????????Engaged employees make 48% fewer work injuries.

·????????37% lower absenteeism in engaged organizations.

Ideas to keep your employees engaged

·????????Invest in your employee’s development and growth.

Investing in employees' development and focusing on enhancing their skills, knowledge, and areas of development increase their loyalty and commitment to the organization and also helps to build a strong employee knowledge, and prepare a second line that maintains organization sustainability.

·????????Build a Career growth path

Having a clear career path gives more clarity to employees to understand their potential growth, and what it’s their next step within the organization, which benefits the organization by being implementing an internal promotion program and reducing external hiring for higher levels.

·????????Create passion projects

If you have a good database that gives you feasibility on the employees' passions and interests, you can create work-related projects involving the passion of the employees, add more experienced team to the project to lead and guide and the outcome will be surprised as you will for sure have a successful project to the organization along with highly engaged employees that doing what they passionate about.

·????????Mentorship program

A lot of employees especially at the junior level have the passion and eagerness to work but also have a high level of unclarity along with fear of seeking guidance. However, if they have a dedicated mentor or work buddy that they can approach for guidance, that will improve their level of confidence and reduce the number of day-to-day operational mistakes, and the mentor will always guide and advise with the right action.

·????????Ideas are rewarded

A log of companies having a suggestion box or email to receive employees' suggestions. However, limited companies reward these ideas. You need to have complete suggestion programs that reward and engage employees. Create a clear workflow, guide employees on what kind of ideas they need to think about, and how to share, you will need to put it on the right platform to become a streamlined idea then involve the initiator in the process of implementation to see their idea coming to life added to the rewards. This will rock the employee motivation to the sky.

·????????Skip level up

Grant employees to skip direct manager and go one level up for meetings, suggestions, and concerns. However, this is sensitive and risky as a lot of education and control are required to know what can and cannot be escalated.

·????????Growth mindset

My growth is not my manager's responsibility it’s mine, this should be all employees' mindset. Employees need to understand that the manager's role is to enable, encourage, guide, advise and give you the opportunity if any.

·????????Work environment

Create a fun, comfortable, and result-oriented workplace. Don’t focus on small things such as attendance (based on the nature of work) instead, try to create a creative and fun workplace among the team, try to choose comfortable furniture, a nice pantry, a clean restroom, good lights, fair space between people, etc. Employees work almost 40% of their day (60% of their wake time) at the office so they need to feel it’s a stress-free office. Let them work remotely at least once a month (based on the nature of work), and have your meeting with your team in an external or different location than usual once in a while.

·????????Fairness culture

Fairness between the employees is essential, letting someone overloaded as they are a good performer while someone else has less work might be a solution for a temporary period but if it keeps going, it will lead to good performer frustration and resignation in the longer run. Ensure fairness as maximum as you can, main points that employees look at and compare are timing, workload, salary, benefits, titles, and much more especially for the same job description and one level up.

·????????Transparency

Update employees with relevant information. They cannot be always surprised by an organization's actions or news, transparency lets employees feel aware and involved.

·????????Delegate & empower

Delegating tasks is different than dumping tasks, delegating tasks is empowering people to make some decisions and perform takes that are not part of their daily job which will give them a sense of responsibility, enhance their knowledge and prepare them for the next step.

·????????Ask for opinion and feedback.

Create a culture of feedback. Allow them to share their thoughts, improve what is possible, and explain what is not. Give employees multiple channels to share their thoughts through a meeting, one-to-one, survey, email, system, phone, or any other available forms.

·????????Don’t Overpromise

For candidates or new joiners or even for existing employees, try to keep your promises realistic and within your authority, you can give your thoughts, plan or overview about the future but avoid promises that you may be unable to achieve.

·????????Digitalize and automate

As much as possible, avoid manual and paperwork as you will not only improve the process, you are also eliminating a lot of risks and processing, and keep offices clear from a lot of paper.

·????????Activity

Maintain a frequent activity plan that let them gather, have fun, talk, and think, which will refresh their mind, allow them to go back to work from a different perspective on things, and reduce work stress.

·????????Work-life balance

·????????A lot of employees focus on work and forget about their personal lives, if that is the case, the company should be worried as a negative impact on employees' personal life will for sure negatively impact employee performance and productivity. Force employees to maintain this balance for their mental health and to avoid negative impact on the organization

·????????Joining and exit engagement.

For new employees, be with them all the way until they are settled and aware of the work nature and culture as well as be familiar with their day-to-day tasks.

For employees who intend to leave, don’t let them go easy, ask them the reason and don’t accept the first answer as it’s usually not the accurate one, spent a quality time to have a better understanding to their concerns and the real reason of leaving, work on that to avoid more leaver and improve these concerns.

There are 100s more of different ways to engage employees and improve the organization's culture and environment. You can see that I never mentioned increment! Money is important but it’s not the solution here.

How to measure your engagement rate?

The most common method used is surveys and here it’s best to appoint an external party to conduct this survey to ensure fairness, accuracy, and confidentiality. Also, inform employees in advance about this survey, the reason behind it, and stress its confidentiality.

Try to have a true outcome. So, target at least 80-90% of staff by avoiding conducting the survey in holiday sessions, get the true emotion, don’t conduct right after distributing bonus or performance appraisal or even salary changes.

Try to use questions that cover all areas and be careful in the way of phrasing the questions to avoid double meaning or directing the receiver to a specific answer..

What to do with the outcome?

It’s avital to announce an overview of the outcome positive or negative and create a team who can put together an action plan and review its implementation. Also, most properly you will categorize your employees into three different types usually distributed as below:

·????????29% Engaged Employees

Employees who are loyal and committed, productive, and easy to retain.

?·????????52% Not Engaged Employees

For employees who are productive but not fully loyal or committed to the organization, you can retain them and resolve their concerns and work on moving them to the engaged category.

·????????19% Actively Disengaged Employees

Employees who are not productive or satisfied and also spreading negativity everywhere, you can try to move their negativity to a natural feeling than to a productive and positive side and who remain in that zone, it’s better to remove from the team to avoid negative impact on others.

To conclude, employee engagement is the Human Resource secret ingredients of employee satisfaction, happiness, productivity, and retention. every organization needs to have an engagement program in place at the strategic level.

Reference

9 Employee Engagement Statistics That Matter in 2021 - Achievers

Motivation Statistics 2022: By the Numbers | TeamStage

What Is Employee Engagement? A Short Definition - Quick Read (myhubintranet.com)