Employee Engagement Is Easier Than It Seems

As of 2021, 36 percent of employees across the globe are engaged in their work. With more changes put in place to cater to the modern workplace, engaging employees may now seem more possible.

Why Should You Engage Your Employees?

Engaging employees is about making them feel more passionate about their jobs and be more likely to devote themselves to the organisation. If you are looking at ways to retain your workers, you should be engaging them. If you are aiming to make your employees advocates of your organisation, you should engage them. Ultimately, this engagement should translate to better employee experience, employer branding for your company and bring about faster hiring.

Adapting to the Covid-19 Circumstances

Additionally, with the rise of Covid-19, more of us are turning to remote working. Are you seeing a fall in engagement level in your workers? Well, more than ever, employees may find it increasingly difficult to stay engaged. It is now your responsibility to seek ways to engage your remote workers. 

How Can HR Engage Workers?

How then can you come up with strategies to better engage your workers in today’s pandemic world?

Tip: Listen to Feedback

Do you often observe what your employees need in the office? If you do not understand your employees’ needs, you probably do not know the underlying issue in your organisation and cannot start on a solution. Try taking the first step now – to listen to feedback from your employees, be it about the management, office facilities or workplace culture (previously discussed in our recent blogpost). However, collating the necessary feedback is not enough. Your next step, should be acting on the feedback that you have received. Also, remember to let your employees know that you have listened and taken tangible actions with the feedback, even if it is tough to make changes.

According to Qualtrics EmployeeXM 2020 Employee Experience Trends Report, 65% of respondents indicated that they are granted the opportunity to provide feedback, yet only 25% of them responded that their company turns their feedback into action “very or extremely well”. It is important to take the right actions regarding the feedback you receive in order to win your employees over.

Tip: Present new challenges

Do you observe how your employees tend to seek new challenges and attempt to achieve new milestones every now and then? This is likely because these milestones would bring more value to each employee’s worth, developing them in terms of skills and strengthening their character. This could be why employees wish to be given challenges at work, hopefully to prove something new about themselves. And as HR, we can play our part to help them, by presenting new obstacles and increasing the difficulty of our employees’ tasks in a realistic manner to keep them hooked on overcoming these challenges.

For example, if you want to raise your employee’s efficiency level, do not be afraid to assign a larger task that you know he or she may not be frequently exposed to, decide on a deadline, and show trust that your employee will do well.

Tip: Execute Training & Development Programmes

Employees love to constantly upgrade themselves to contribute better to their current role or learn something new if they wish to explore other areas that interest them. As HR, we can craft a pre-plan: First, analyse the type of skillsets that the upcoming tasks may require, then take a day or more to transfer such skillsets to our employees before they start on the tasks next time. This will ultimately expand employees’ range of skills, which can be applied almost immediately in the upcoming projects.

Tip: Recognition

Another essential motivating factor for your employees would be recognising their achievements while they work at your organisation. Nothing beats a celebratory gift or mini certificate to congratulate them for doing a great job!

Source: https://www.canva.com/certificates/templates/recognition/

Tip: Flexible Work Arrangements

Report shows that employees are more inclined to be productive at work when their work arrangements are more flexible. Working at one’s own preferred time (Flexi-hours) gives the freedom to plan one’s own time, especially for employees who are aware of their most efficient time of the day. Some employees also prefer to complete their work in batches, so they do not have to finish it entirely at one go.

Tip: Virtual Team Bonding

At the end of the day, every team would fall back on its teamwork to boost its overall performance. If you want to improve your employees’ teamwork, inculcate team spirit by organising frequent team bonding events and watch as they slowly become engaged. We will be covering more on team bonding activities and effective communication strategies in the workplace for working remotely, in the next blogpost.

Although many companies have much to work towards engaging their employees, it is easier than you may think. All you need is some creativity when crafting a solution to keep your employees occupied.