Employee engagement has been a hot topic in the year 2021, with on-going pandemic to large scale of employee turnover, there seem to be endless challenges in the current business sector. Year 2021 marked the highest employee turnover with more than 4 million workers quitting their jobs in the U.S. and 3.9 million quitting in July 2021. Companies are finding it difficult to keep their remote workforce engaged.
The combination of poor remote work management, rigid work hours, bad employee experience, micromanagement, reduced perks and benefits, were just some of the causes for this huge number of turnover. Employee engagement in a remote work environment can lead to an organization’s success and help companies recover and thrive their employees so that they stay with the company. However, providing a great working environment to keep your employees engaged is easier said than done.
What Is Employee Engagement and Why Is It Crucial?
Employee engagement refers to the level of eagerness and connection employees feel towards their company. It is also often mixed with terms such as employee happiness or satisfaction, but both of the terms are considerably different. Happiness is a personalized term that varies on a day-to-day basis. For example, casual Fridays can increase employee happiness without affecting employee engagement. Similarly, a satisfied employee is more content with their jobs but not enough inspired to spend extra energy than they need to. Undoubtedly employee engagement is the most important from all these terms because its impacts are measurable. For example, businesses with engaged team members enjoy higher profitability, increased productivity and higher customer ratings according to a survey published by Forbes.
Employee engagement is the key indicator of the enthusiasm employees feel while performing their task, their level of motivation and loyalty within the company. They are less likely to switch their job, saving you the associated expense of hiring and training new employees.
Engaged employees are always eager to perform better and go the extra mile to help your business achieve its goals and are more likely to stay around to share in its success. To achieve employee engagement you have to approach with the right strategy. As a HR manager, you have to create a perfect work environment for your remote and on-site employees to boost their productivity and increase their engagement at work. If you are wondering how to do that? Then worry no more. In this article, we will share the top six employee engagement trends to watch in 2022.
6 Employee Engagement Trends To Improve Performance
1. Develop Realistic Company Goals: One of the most important strategies to improve employee engagement is to set realistic goals for your employees. Plan your organizational goals in a way that motivates your employees to achieve it. Share your long-term strategy with your employees to let them understand how they should develop their skills to adjust with that. If you set up complicated goals for them, there will be a lot of uncertainty. Unrealistic goals can create major roadblocks when it comes to increasing employee engagement level. However, you workforce will be more driven towards realistic goals and to do that you have to ensure that the goals you set them are realistic, achievable and measurable. Also keep in mind these point to nourish employee engagement in your company:
- Maintain clarity with your employees
- Involve them in your decision-making process
- Encourage your employees to provide feedbacks
- Sort out any miscommunication instantly
2. Establish Improved communication: A proper communication is an integral part of an employee’s professional growth in the organization. Appropriate communication can eliminate conflicts and misunderstandings between co-workers. This can create a major roadblock while trying to improve the engagement levels of the workforce. To promote good and healthy communication in your organization, you should –
- Encourage your remote and on-site employee to communicate with each other in a daily basis
- Provide your team with right virtual platform for employees to effortlessly to communicate with each other
- Share any new update and ideas with your teams through communication platform
- Host virtual meeting to connect your on-site and remote teams together
- Improved participation will increase mutual understanding
3. Monitor Your Employees: Monitoring your employees is one of the secrets to increase employee engagement in the workplace. Post pandemic, a large number of companies have shifted either fully remote or partially remote. Installing monitoring work from home employees software is extremely essential for them to get the work activities data of their employees to better understand their work process. The tool will help your employees to track their own working hours and see their reports, which will help them to plan their daily activities in a more efficient way. The HR manager can use this software to check which employee is working productively and help those who are not performing as per company expectation. With the right approach and employee monitoring tool, it is possible to keep your employees engaged and motivated.
4. Foster Healthy Team-Building Activities: Workplace is not always only about work. A continuous working environment with no room for fun activities can hurt employee morale. As a HR manager, come up with ideas for team-building activities. The more your team members connect with each other, the better they perform. Fun activities help break the monotonous work environment and are an important part of healthy employee engagement strategies. There are a lot of activities that you can try to improve employee unity. While you are planning for any internal fun activity within your team members, make sure that it is compatible with the workforce. A simple non-work related chit chat can also help your team come closer. For your virtual team, you can host a meeting where you and your team will only talk about each other and not work. These simple acts can make your employees feel better and help them to be more productive.
5. Build an Employee-centric Culture: Employees feel highly encouraged to work in an environment that cares about them and fulfills their requirements. When employees feel valued in their company, it increases their efficiency and productivity. As a HR leader, you need to understand the importance of building an employee-centric workplace to boost your employee engagement efforts. To facilitate such a workplace, you need to-
- Provide beneficial employee benefits
- Encourage your employees to foster better work-life balance
- Acknowledge and reward employees on time
- Provide training, mentoring or career development assistance
6. Encourage Work Flexibility: Giving work flexibility can bring more benefit for both employers and employees. When employees get the chance to adjust their working schedules and location as per their own flexibility it automatically boosts employee productivity and reflects on their performance. When you provide your employees flexibility, your employees are much likely to be happy and engaged. All that you have to do as a HR manager is to keep a watchful eye on work progress of employees so that work gets done without any trust issue.
Summing it Up!
Try our employee engagement trends to foster a work culture that is proficient and competent. Not only will it improve overall employee performance but it will also increase job satisfaction. With the right plans and strategies you can easily improve employee engagement in your company and help your company achieve its highest goals.
