Creating a highly-engaged workforce and a thriving workplace continues to be a major focus for all HR managers. And the reason is simple. Every business needs what employee engagement creates: Happier and more productive employees.
Moving into 2018, employee engagement is more important than ever. So, whether you work in an ambitious tech company, a growth-minded healthcare organisation, a fast-paced hospitality business, or somewhere else entirely, putting employees first needs to be your priority.
If you’re serious about putting employees first, here are four employee engagement trends you need to put into practice and master this year.
1. Employee experience
It’s all about placing a high value on your employees and ensuring they are happy. Rather than simply focusing on how you’re doing through the results of your employee engagement surveys, turn your attention to proactively developing the employee experience to produce better engagement from the get-go.
Employee experience is everything an employee experiences about your company. The journey begins even before they apply for a job, and it continues long after the employee leaves the business. It also includes the physical environment where your people work and your company’s culture.
By focusing on the employee experience, you can actively set employees up for success with the right tech tools, influence your company culture, and craft workplace policies that resonate with today’s workers.
So, while employee engagement and your employees’ commitment to your company and their jobs is the end goal, employee experience delivers the means to get there in the most direct way.
And just as customer experience professionals optimise customer journeys for better customer engagement, your role as HR manager is to create an optimal employee experience. And with it, happier and more productive employers, higher retention rates, and lower turnover follow suit.
Key take away: For companies in high-tech sectors where the war for talent rages on, or for those in industries such as healthcare or aged care services where jobs like nursing require specialised skills but do not offer overly attractive compensation, the employee experience has the potential to become a major competitive advantage.
Offering a superior employee experience can help you attract and retain the best talent. Just as optimising the customer journey leads to satisfied customers, a great employee experience produces satisfied employees.
2. Employee career pathing
It’s no secret that millennials crave opportunities to learn and grow. It’s one major factor that sets them apart from other generations. According to Gallup analytics, millennials rank opportunities to learn and grow in a job above everything else.
Millennial workers, in particular, won’t stick around if they don’t have a sense that they can grow in your business.
So, rather than tackling high millennial turnover as a fact of life, in 2018 put your employees’ career development aspirations first. The art of keeping millennial engaged at work is letting them know what opportunities exist within the company.
Invest in employee career development and build on the opportunities you provide to your employees to learn and grow. This is your chance as the HR manager to
make sure you (and your people managers) have developed career goals and pathways for each of your employees support them through their employee journey and career advancement.
Talk to your people about their aspirations, goals, and ambitions. Find out what your people want to become and then figure out how to align their personal passions with the business objectives.
Key take away: The goal of making career development opportunities a part of your company culture is to allow employees to see for themselves where they can go in their career with your company. Setting up continuous cycles of promotion and keeping your people in the loop about internal opportunities could keep them from seeking opportunities elsewhere.
3. Flexible working
From increased employee engagement to better performance, and company loyalty, the benefits of flexible working are now very well established. As a trend, flexible working arrangements are set to continue this year. So, if you still aren’t allowing your employees to have some say over how, where, or when they work, consider it a priority in 2018.
Whether this involves working from home, job sharing, part-time hours or something else entirely, it’s important that both you as the employer and your employee agree on the arrangements. Flexible working is only effective if it works for all parties. In addition, with more of a focus on wellbeing this year, offering a healthy work-life balance is more important than ever.
Key take away: Embedding a culture of flexibility by offering flexible working allows you to attract, retain, and develop the best possible talent, and ensure a positive work-life balance for employees. It’s also important to bear in mind that employees often value flexibility over other more traditional forms of compensation like pay rises.
4. Recognition
Receiving praise and recognition from managers has always been a strong motivator, it’s also the backbone of employee engagement. By embracing different ways to recognise employee performance you not only motivate individuals but help increase productivity and quality output from the entire team.
Most employees prefer real-time feedback over annual performance reviews simply because real-time feedback allows meaningful actions to be taken when it matters most. A culture of continuous feedback also leads to more transparent performance expectations. Experimenting with technology such as Pulse feedback tools will give you an immediate understanding of the employee experience and how you can improve it.
Key take away:Don’t wait for an annual review to focus on areas for improvement or opportunities for development. Start to make use of social recognition platforms and provide an appropriate platform for your employees to reward and recognise each other’s contributions.
Put your people first with the right HR tech tools
Ensuring your employees have the technology and the tools they need to be efficient and productive is an important baseline in employee engagement. It’s an investment in your people and the business. From an HR perspective, it’s also essential that you deploy the right HR tools and technology to reduce the amount of HR admin tasks that you and your employees need to handle.
Request a demo
Equipping employees with self-service tools and apps that streamline traditionally time-consuming tasks like onboarding, requesting paid time off, doing performance reviews, or making routine HR updates, like a change of address, deliver big wins.
Request a demo of Employment Hero today and see how using our modern HR processes, tools, and documents, you’ll better in a strong position to put employees first and develop your employee engagement strategy.
