Having a high level of employee engagement remains one of the biggest challenges facing business managers. There are countless studies showing how engaged employees will result in higher productivity and improved retention and will enable recruitment, innovate and boost profitability.
However, being engaged is not always the same as being productive. Indeed, in a recent study of Forbes nearly 87% of employees expect their employer to support them in balancing work and personal commitments. Arguably there are cases where people score highly in terms of employee engagement because they are able to coast, which is the antithesis of what business managers are looking to achieve.
Equally, without due attention being given to employee engagement, the downsides are clear: research conducted by Sirota Intelligence on Fortune 500 companies showed that in 85% of cases employees’ morale declined sharply after their first six months working for the company.
Why is this happening and how can it be avoided?
The key is to understand what employees want from their workplace. Research shows the main criteria include:
The Employer’s Brand
In the digital era, thanks to portals such as glassdoor, an employer’s brand is becoming increasingly tangible, enabling potential recruits to investigate the company they are interviewing with ahead of time. Indeed, 75% of job seekers would consider an employer’s brand before applying for a job. In the same way, if a company invests in its brand, this is seen by existing employees, resulting in immediate benefits there too.
Training & Development
People want to feel they are developing their skills for their preferred career path. Nothing is more demotivating than for people to feel that their career amounts to doing exactly the same thing every day, with no opportunity for development. But enabling people to take a step up requires businesses to make the investment in training people, which can be a considerable financial commitment.
Compensation
The challenge with regard to compensation is balancing what the cost of the employee is currently versus what their transfer salary is should they decide to leave. Studies show that whilst employees will accept a small deficit between what they currently earn and what they would earn elsewhere, that can only be temporary, meaning that only having annual salary reviews can directly lead to disengagement. Having a more flexible culture where salary reviews are more frequent is recommended.
Management Style
When employees have issues with their direct managers, that is quite often the most likely reason why they then decide to leave their company. In the absence of exit interviews that can be difficult to identify as the cause, making it a danger point for retention. How managers are assessed needs to incorporate how engaged their teams are. Demoting managers should be done if that is necessary to protect overall engagement.
Peer Group
Positive working relationships with colleagues is something that is the hardest for business managers to facilitate. Put simply, people come to work to pursue their professional careers and to earn money, but their environment in terms of who they work with day to day is out of their control. In this environment it is easy for hiring managers to pursue a mono-culture strategy, in the knowledge that people will be more likely to get on with people they can identify with. Equally, an office that lacks diversity has its own drawbacks.
With that in mind, team building comes to the fore. Arguably only through management choosing to implement a strategy that engenders good working relationships between peers can that happen. Not all team building needs to be expensive, indeed just inviting out the team for a meal constitutes team building and gives them the chance to get to know each other outside the confines of their professional existence.
For managers who want to invest more in team building, recommended exercises include volunteering, team sports, field trips or professional development exercises. Finally, remember investing in team building needs to be a process, not a one off. Consistently implementing exercises designed to facilitate engagement will be seen as genuine, where in the millennial generation being an employer people want to work for is becoming increasingly valuable.
Here are even more ways to motivate your employees, besides giving them a monetary reward.
Over the last ten years Vacancysoft has worked with recruitment firms of all sizes to help them map out market activity in order to identify changes in demand. For more information about how we can help, please contact us.
