At an HR management level, there are a few things more religiously observed than employee engagement trends. Unlike the past, when baby boomers showed up diligently for work and stuck to the same job for years, the present workforce is young, idealistic, and driven by personal goals and values.
As such, engagement and productivity in the workplace don’t come easy – especially if you’re not making sure your employees are engaged.
Continue reading for a look at how you can keep your workers engaged, motivated, and satisfied.
Imagine yourself in a workplace: You show up, do your best, and wait to be noticed for your hard work. Months pass and you hear no feedback on your work performance or, at the very least, a pat on the back.
How would that feel?
In order to be engaged at work, employees are increasingly demanding that they receive feedback on their progress. Moreover, even the most modest workers like to be recognized for the work that they do and be rewarded for it. At a time where loyalty and commitment don’t come easy, employers need to take the extra step to show their employees that they’re valuable to the company.
Research in this field supports this view. In a survey conducted among professionals, 58% of the group endorsed giving recognition to employees as a way to improve engagement. Related research also shows that recognition increases employee engagement up to a whopping 60%.
Nowadays, the employee experience has become a holistic one: Employers can no longer only concern themselves with compensation and a healthy workplace. Wellness programs, those that boost the mental and physical health of the workforce, are becoming an important part of employee engagement trends.
With managers realizing that healthy and happy employees are the key to greater productivity, providing them with the resources to achieve full health has now become a vital part of company strategy.
A few examples of what companies have done to improve employee wellness include providing them with meditation rooms, sports facilities, group yoga classes, medical plans and related health benefits packages.
Another employee engagement trend organizations are paying attention to is the need for thoughtful and compassionate leadership.
Employees want someone who isn’t just understanding, but also someone who’s fair, holds others accountable, empathetic and is committed to his/her employees in a genuine way.
A good leader, therefore, is perfectly capable of improving employee engagement by supervising and working together with employees in a way that adds value to the latter and provides constructive feedback.
With the power of data analytics having (finally) consumed the HR industry, managers, nowadays, turn to data not just to tackle big company issues like turnover, but also to make day-to-day improvements in terms of employee engagement.
With the increasing sophistication of workplace psychometric platforms – especially those that generate personalized insights on the workplace attitudes and behaviors of every employee – people analytics have become the cornerstone of HR management.
In Deloitte’s 2018 Global Human Capital Trends report, it was found that 84% of respondents viewed people analytics as important or very important. In the future, this will prove to be even more so, as organizations begin using these platforms to finetune workplace experience.
In terms of the latest employee engagement trends, there are few more desirable to employees than the ability to work on a flexible schedule.
At a time when 9-to-5 desk jobs are so out of touch, flexible working hours – with the ability to work from home – is very much in vogue. In fact, a recent survey found that 76% of respondents believed that a flexible work schedule was the best incentive their employer could offer them.
Staying ahead of employee engagement trends is usually not the hard part – incorporating them into your workplace is usually where organizations get stuck.
It’s crucial, nonetheless, that employers take these trends seriously. By providing employees with the resources they need to become their best selves and by creating a healthy and flexible workplace, loyalty, engagement, and retention aren’t hard to come by.
