How will HR and business leaders drive employee engagement?

The global workforce is getting transformed with more millennials joining the workforce. What we hear is that this generation requires a different workplace experience with constant feedback, instant recognition. Feedback and recognition are only 2 elements of Millennials’ workplace expectations. This generation needs to be continuously engaged and involved with the organisation. Today, organisations do not narrowly focus on building an engagement-driven culture. Instead, many leading organisations aim to improve the workplace experience they offer to the employees. This purpose is achieved through establishing pulse surveys, and new employee self-service technologies. Organisations are considering ways to reinvent the people management practices to foster employee engagement. This initiative is supported by a leadership that believes the importance of engaging and retaining the best employees. We see a breed of new HR solutions getting emerged globally. These solutions are powered by digital, mobile, cloud and social technologies. The new digitally enabled HR software platforms are made to rewrite the rules of traditional people management. The new digital HR age demands organisations to drive employee engagement via each element of HR. For an example employees should be able to share a new suggestion, idea/ thought with the peers and colleagues. Creating a stage for employees to voice their thoughts and share it with the organisation makes employees realize their engagement with the organisation. Pulse surveys are becoming more popular among the new generation of employees as well as among business leaders. organisations can capture employees’ feedback on company practices and events through pulse surveys, analyses the findings and make decisions to better the future initiatives. Not only these tools ascertain employee engagement, but these certainly assist organisations to alter company practices towards a better direction. Although the employee engagement brings a range of values and benefits, there are several factors that make the employee engagement a challenging goal to achieve.

• Many organisations have not yet made employee engagement a priority
• Most organisations have not given the responsibility to specific individual or team to outline and convey the employee engagement.
• Siloed HR divisions frequently think that it’s hard to use/apply engagement tools to achieve this purpose
• Many organisations stay focused creating an engaging experience only at a specific event. This indicates that companies have not thought how to incorporate employee engagement into talent management disciplines such as performance management and learning management. organisations should rethink their performance and training practices to engage employees better with those practices. Adding social features to performance practices will help employees to appreciate the achievements of their peers. This encourages employees to achieve better results while strengthening the engagement between employees. organisations need a fresh approach to face these challenges head-on. This approach contains 3 steps.

 

1. Transforming the attitude and mindset

HR needs to play the role of a consultant and explain the importance of employee engagement to the leadership. This will help organisations win leadership buy-in for employee engagement techniques. Business leaders should essentially understand that engaging employees by providing/receiving feedback, giving instant recognition will raise employees’ satisfaction with the workplace experience.

2. Adapting social and mobile technologies.

Use of mobile applications and smartphones is obviously increasing every minute. With every employee using a smartphone, HR can automate self-service functionalities and establish many initiatives to drive engagement. Increased use of mobile will enable the organisation and employees to share real-time feedback. Adding social features to the most cumbersome HR work including performance appraisals and even employee training will simplify these processes.

3. Making Engagement an organisation-wide practice

How frequently should we engage our employees? Engagement should be an organisation-wide and a regular practice. This is why new HR platforms are powered by digital technologies and tools such as pulse surveys. These tools are meant to receive views and feedback from employees across the organisation. HR can make engagement a regular practice by introducing self-service capabilities on mobile devices. Mobile enabled HR and self-service will bring employees closer to the business. Incorporation of engagement techniques to talent management practices will help HR drive engagement in every key HR process. It’s time to stop concerning about employee turnover. An engaged and aligned workforce will be the workforce that grows with the organisation and supports the organisation to prosper. The employee should be given a true purpose at their work, something to look forward to. Keeping your employees involved shows how the organisation values them. Traditionally, HR has developed and implemented solutions independently to make engagement work. This was done through forms to collect employee feedback. Modern Digital HR platforms provide ideal solutions to this. Digital HR platforms provide a different experience where employees can update their profiles themselves, post their ideas, suggestions and work-life events, and the others would be able to like and comment, give their suggestions too. Having the ability to share thoughts with your peers and even wish them on birthdays, work anniversaries, other achievements will make the workplace an interesting place to engage with. Establishing employee engagement with these tools and winning the current challenges of managing millennial employees will offer more benefits to HR and business leaders which we will discuss further in our future posts. Also, we will be discussing more about how the Digital HR would make the employee life easier in our upcoming blogs.