As the world recovers from the epidemic and the companies start opening up the offices and request employees to return to work, companies expect a lot of resignations and companies need to keep the employees engaged continuously to avoid this.
There are three important factors that managers can use to boost employee engagement.
- Help employees connect what they do to what they would like to do
- Make work more enjoyable and less stressful.
- reward employees with more time off, besides financial benefits.
However, very few managers are aware of this.
From theory to practice.
We know from various studies that engagement involves four elements and is a degree to which an employee:
- feels committed to the organisation.
- identifies with it,
- feels satisfied
- feels energised.
These factors are identified by doing a survey and the issue is how to distil this knowledge and apply it properly.
Engagement checklist.
Identify what employees care about:
- Align company mission statement with employee values: Today, employees identify themselves with an organisation that encourages social change and one that practices social and environmental responsibility.
- Show that the work is related to the organisation purpose: Employees should see the correlation between the work they do and the organisation mission. Company-wide meetings, small group sessions help align their work with the organisation’s mission.
- Encourage groups with diverse interests and goals: Groups are voluntary bringing together individuals with similar interests together. It allows employees to connect with peers sharing their values and goals.
Make work more enjoyable and less stressful.
- Offer flexibility so employees can identify what interests them: Consider job rotation and move employees through various assignments to identify their interests.
- Grant more autonomy: Autonomy is necessary to promote intrinsic motivation. This makes the employees act with more responsibility and allows them to pursue the work they find enjoyable and interesting. Also, individuals can enhance their feeling of autonomy by not being bound by a fixed time.
- Boost employees self-confidence: People avoid tasks that they are not confident of doing. Confidence is important to encourage employees to initiate tasks.
Create time offs:
- Reward employees with time: Rewarding employees with time along with financial incentives increases the feeling of affluence among employees. It is especially important today with the remote work increasing the time at work. One way is to give employees extra mandatory time. It is an effective way of increasing employee engagement.
- Encourage time-saving techniques: Time-saving techniques enable employees to spend money on products that encourage more leisure time. Organisations can tie-up with third parties to sell their products directly to their employees saving them valuable time.
- Discourage after office hours emails: Encourage tools that allow employees to use tools to pause emails allowing them more leisure time. Organisations can turn off email notifications after office hours.
Managers must take proactive steps to increase employee engagement. The challenge is to encourage leaders to combine theory and data with practice to understand what should be prioritised in the workplace.
How Companies Can Improve Employee Engagement Right Now
by Daniel Stein, Nick Hobson, Jon M. Jachimowicz, and Ashley Whillans
HBR 2021/10
R2G 