Improving employee engagement in a hybrid-working model
Designing the workplace of the future requires leaders to adopt a new mindset about employee needs, as well as new strategies and tools to keep the team focused, engaged and energised. Now more than ever, organisations need to reflect on the ways in which they can support their employees to be able to work and feel their best and keep teams engaged and productive - but what does this actually mean?
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement is the strength of the mental and emotional connection your employees feel towards their work, team, and organisation. It affects just about every aspect of your company' performance including profitability, revenue, customer experience and employee turnover.
Why is employee engagement so important?
It’s no secret that people are key to business success. But, beyond that obvious fact, the future workforce - millennials and Generation Z - increasingly expect more from their employers and work environment.
In order to attract and retain talent, engaging employees needs to be a top priority. Value your workforce, empower and trust them and you’ll receive the reward and positive impact of a productive, loyal and collaborative team.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of employee engagement.
Cultivate passion
Organisations with healthy working environments don’t rely on peer pressure, stress or fear to motivate employees - they run on passion. Alignment to corporate purpose and a strong organisational culture are key drivers of employee engagement and performance.
Workplace engagement at a managerial level has an enormous impact on team behaviours. Passion is contagious, and a leader's enthusiasm for their company’s collective effort will inspire employees to engage just as profoundly with their own work.
Retain talent
It’s not easy recruiting the right people for the job, and filling empty roles requires significant resources. Making the most of your existing talent pool, building their capability and finding a teachable moment after failure may feel challenging, but the time, effort and risk of hiring replacement staff should be recognised as far harder.
An engagement strategy is an employee retention strategy: turnover inevitably drops, saving time, money and effort. Additionally, there are substantial benefits around retaining valuable historical corporate knowledge that a committed, long-term team can hold.
It is vital to work on strategies to build trust and improve employee engagement. If your team members know that they'll be recognised for their contributions, have opportunities for personal growth, and understand when and why business change happens, they’ll have less reason to leave. Retaining long-term talent is becoming a real competitive advantage as people learn from previous competitors and market events and so should be well-placed to anticipate future competitive advantages.
Boost productivity
Forget the fads for boosting work rate. Engaged employees increase productivity. Simple. Productive teams focus more on working collaboratively, understand business-critical workstreams better and are more likely to focus on the prioritised pressing projects. They talk more with each other and waste less time on solo endeavours.
They also experience higher levels of job satisfaction and are better aligned to corporate culture. This becomes a virtuous cycle as they are more likely to be valued by the organisation and more likely to receive pay increases or promotions.
Lower absenteeism
When you’re invested in your job and care about the success of the business, you show up to work more. If an employee feels valued and secure in their role and engaged in the company's purpose, their internal accountability for delivery is increased. Interestingly, it can also mean that they feel more able to take the occasional day off, when needed due to illness, without fear of negative consequences. This is correlated with recovering faster and not spreading the illness to colleagues leading to improved team health.
The odd day off can therefore be a sign of good employee engagement as it leads to lower absenteeism overall and is likely to mitigate far more serious issues of long-term absenteeism, due to burnout.
Increase profitability
An engaged team is an important goal on its own given how much time many of us spend at work. This being said, it is a known fact that the benefits of an engaged team will increase corporate earnings and profit. It will also help employers to attract and retain high-quality talent, further perpetuating a positive financial impact. Successful businesses place employee engagement at the centre of business strategy, which necessitates the provision of strategies and tools to build and measure good engagement.
What’s the difference between employee engagement and employee experience?
These definitions can be slippery, so to all be on the same page here, let’s take a look at the distinctions. In simplest terms, we can think of employee experience as environment, or provision of essential environmental services, spaces and ways of working. Employee engagement is the output of those factors, which are also influenced by the corporate culture.
There are, of course, more complex and conflicting explanations. Some companies consider employee engagement as a ‘top-down’ philosophy, by which purpose and culture filters down to employees. In this sense, employee experience is more ‘bottom-up’, in that work processes are designed around their employees.
We might also consider employee experience as a broader term, which constitutes the entire journey an employee takes within a company, from before they even join to after they leave, and everything in between.