One piece to creating a successful employee engagement is having events in your company. Events, big or small create a sense of bonding between coworkers. They help establish relationships, which can lead to a sense of belonging to the company. Each company has their own way of bringing unity within the company. Below is a list of different types of events that your company is already doing or could maybe start to liven things up.
“A little Party never hurt nobody”
Different types of events:
Holiday parties- Oh the holidays! How they bring about such a wonderful, happy time. That happy time can create quite a positive mood with office employees especially when it comes to holiday parties. Having a holiday party is good about bringing unity and a good time outside the office. But make sure to keep a limit and don’t have the event get to out of control.
Fitness Classes- Fitness classes that the company provides, such as yoga or boot camps show another side of your coworkers. It’s a place where everyone can let off some steam before going back to work. And is a great added benefit or incentive if the company is willing to provide this outlet for their employees.
Happy Hour- an easy after work get together where everyone can go and enjoy a quick drink or some appetizers before heading home. It’s a nice way to end a work day. Some companies let employees leave a little earlier to attend, or some have the means to be able to have the happy hour in the office break room or a conference room, so employees don’t have to go far and can just head home.
Team building – Team building shows coworkers in a different light. Depending what the activities are for the day, usually they are exercises that show we need to rely on each other to get the job done. For example: Some companies have team building exercises at Escape rooms because everyone in their room is working together to get out before the time is out. Other teams do outdoor activities or go bowling to just create a relaxed environment outside of the office that also creates time for conversation besides work. Having an activity to bond about or talk about makes it easier to engage in those types on conversations as well.
Some other honorable mentions are attending Conferences with your team members and Employee Appreciation Day. The goal and benefit of all these activities is to create bonding experiences with coworkers outside of work in a more relaxed setting so that they feel a part of a community. What are other events that your company could put on to build your employees up?
Being an employee, the first thing you will think of when considering staying or changing your job is the WIIFM approach. This basically stands for, as a job seeker, “what’s in it for me” to take this new role, whether it is an internal or external role. Job seekers can have different priorities in terms of key motivators. Keeping this in mind, what is the key motivator to retain employees?
There are a lots of different reasons as to what helps retain an employee, which we will delve into in this blog series, but the key/driving factor is Career Development. Career Development deals with the progression of an employee in their career. This is something that, “over the past two decades organizations have encouraged their employees to be career self-reliant. They’ve been telling employees to ‘take charge’ of their own careers and not rely on the organization to provide guidance”.
While this works to some extent, the changing expectations of employees in the workplace requires greater collaboration. While I do believe that employees must take charge, the organization/company needs to help facilitate the process by providing clarity and opportunity.
There are different motivating factors to help retain employees that relate to their career development, such as:
Higher income as they grow in a role at their company
Growth opportunities in titles with the company
And a new one, when the employee feels appropriate to move
In the Harvard Business Review, they found “New research conducted by CEB, a Washington-based best-practice insight and technology company, looks not just at why workers quit but also at the timing of the decision or the when. “We’ve learned that what really affects people is their sense of how they’re doing compared with other people in their peer group, or with where they thought they would be at a certain point in life,” says Brian Kropp, who heads CEB’s HR practice. “We’ve learned to focus on moments that allow people to make these comparisons.” (https://hbr.org/2016/09/why-people-quit-their-jobs)
With today’s technology becoming more advanced and with social media connecting more people together either personally or professionally, it is hard to retain employees when they feel that they should be moving forward when different life events occur (either a birthday, an anniversary, the pressure from others that they see). This goes back to the earlier statement about the “what’s in it for me” mentality that drives employees to the different choices they make in their career. Below is a list of ways that I believe companies can work with their employees even during these times and remind them what they can do to stay.
Better communication of internal opportunities: Senior management knows and hears from their employees and managers what is working and what isn’t working for their team. They can then help build and create opportunities within different departments to help encourage their employees to get other internal responsibilities, while creating a culture that is more unitive with new paths that are similar to the job role employees are currently in or wanting to explore. But make sure that this is a career path the employee will want to take on before assigning. It is very important that managers understand the importance of their role when helping employees understanding their career goals and opportunities. Managers should not only assign tasks that their employees know how to do but assign tasks that will help them grow and could create career advancement.
The value of a 9-box: Learning your employees’ capabilities and recognizing their career development at an early stage is very important to the success of your employees’ careers and to the growth of the company. The 9-box is a valuable tool in not just this stage but as the employee grows in the company because it better measures their strengths and weaknesses while also showing where the employee wants for their career.
Customize your career: With your company create a career that has the balance that you need to lead a healthy lifestyle. For an employee’s personal sanity, companies should work well at creating a work and personal/family life balance that can comply well with the career path and job role that the employee is trying to take.
Set clear employee expectations: By setting clear employee expectations, employees will be less frustrated when planning their career path by having more insight or vision on what is being planned. Also, this will help them assess if they have the right skills set for the position or if they would need further training.
Now you can never be prepared when an employee decides they want to leave, but creating some of these perimeters and benefits that show them what is in it for them will encourage them to stay at the company. Either growing in their role or experiencing other internal roles. As companies, we need to make sure we have the right policies, processes and tools to practice this. So how employee growth and development culture ready are you?
Gallup studies show employee engagement is on the rise and, hand-in-hand with this, so are engagement initiatives with many companies going so far as to assess their managers based on how well their employees are engaged. The link between top performing companies and a highly engaged workforce is becoming more and more evident as this trend takes hold.
Who is engaged?
Employee engagement differs between different groups, with managers at the levels at 38.4% and millennials the least engaged at 28.9%. Many factors drive these trends, and for millennials specifically, lack of job opportunities coming out of college or jobs that don’t allow them to feel like a valued and respected member of the team can contribute to this.
What causes employee disengagement?
Whether we like it or not, employees have a life outside of work, and chances are, they care about that life with their family and friends a whole lot more than the 8+ hours a day they spend at the office. That is the life where they are able to create their own goals, set their own priorities, and manage their own work load.
This “dual life” of employees is the root cause of employee disengagement.
What about a lost employee?
A study done by “The Centre for American Progress” shows that the cost of replacing an employee is clustered between 10 percent and 30 percent of an employee’s annual salary.
Consider the real total cost of losing an employee:
Cost of hiring a new person
Cost of onboarding a new person
Lost productivity
Lost engagement
Customer service and errors
Training cost
Cultural impact
Impact on other employees
How can employee disengagement be addressed?
Many ways in which you interact with employees will drive their engagement at work, but this needs to be something addressed and reinforced at all levels of the organization.
Engagement starts at the top.
Mission and vision statements are a way of living.
Create harmony between the “dual lives” of the employees.
Communication is key.
Invest in your employees’ future careers.
Over the next couple of months, we will expand upon these ideas and dive into how specific areas of talent management can have an impact on your overall employee engagement. Some specific topics will include:
How having mobile talent management tools can increase employee engagement
How career paths can encourage and motivate your employees
How development plans can keep employees engaged and promote growth
How promoting your company culture can lead to a more engaged workforce
What is the impact of performance reviews on employee engagement?
Employee: Hey, are we still looking for a project manager for Karen’s team?
Me Recruiter: Yes, we still are. A certified PM that is willing to commute to FAR OFF TOWN has been hard to find.
Employee: Well I know a guy that fits that bill!
Me Recruiter: We are also doing gift cards if they get to interview, and a cash bonus if they get hired. So send them to me!
Employee: Great! I won’t forget to send that resume.
Me Recruiter: Great! I won’t forget to add you to the spreadsheet that’s sitting on my desk.
There are a number of benefits to hiring an employee referral. Including a higher quality of hire, faster application to hire time, lower cost per hire, and a new team member that will work well with your current employees. But often a new, impromptu, or not often used employee referral program can fall through the cracks. Making sure that the employee, their referral, and their appreciation don’t fall through the crack is a combination of preparation and automation.
Getting ready
A successful program requires some simple prior preparation to make sure it’s a clear process.
What are we giving and when?
This conversation can start by defining which positions are most in need of referrals. They may be your hard to staff for positions. They may be positions that benefit most from team members bringing in former team mates that can get up to speed quickly. As you move from defining the positions to that can most benefit from employee referrals, you can define out the rewards.
Typically, rewards are the easiest to convey. Are you giving gift cards, cash, or PTO days? How far in the process does the referral have to get for each reward? A gift card for an interview, cash for 2nd interview, or PTO days for a new hire. As well as do the employees need to submit the resume directly to HR or refer the resume through the Applicant Tracking System.
Next steps
Defining the different rewards and candidate steps will help you define what the process should be for employees and all participants of the hiring team. For this, remember to keep it simple and clear. Make sure the steps for the employee to submit an employee are clear and simple. Make sure the steps for the hiring managers, interviewers, and anyone else who may touch the process are also clear and well documented. For both of these, a short checklist that’s easily distributed, accessible, and redistributed often make sure the new processes will stick.
Tracking referrals
Modern applicant tracking systems will help you track which employees refer a resume in. They can help track when that candidate hits different activities like interview, second interview, offer, and hired. The end result can be consolidated reports on who is owed what level of payout.
If your solution doesn’t support this level of automation, then build these checks into the process. Every time someone is hired, make sure that information is logged to a central point of contact. For the various other candidate activities such as interview or second interview, add that central point of contact to the standard interview forms as an activity. By adding the logging to the process, you can help insure that the information gets to the correct place.
Check-in
Set the schedule of sending out awards. This may be governed by payroll, or by quarterly reviews. Whatever the schedule is, make sure it’s clearly communicated to your employees. Also make sure these schedules include reviews on the quality of hires brought in. Do employees know about the program and the incentives? Are they excited about the incentives? Also, are awards being properly tracked and distributed? Checking these items periodically will help make sure you’ve got a successful program.
Feedback is a critical component to motivating your workforce. According to a recent study by AccentureTM, providing frequent, direct performance appraisals ranks in the top 5 ways to engage your employees*. A technology solution that facilitates this process by providing ongoing access to documented expectations, departmental objectives and goals, and a location where employees can log their achievements and challenges reinforces to employees that they are an important part of the organization’s success.
With a full understanding of factors that drive your top performers, you are able to ensure they have access to the career development opportunities they require. Top performers are often career driven, willing to go the extra mile to remain on the path to success. With Brilliant HR Performance solution in place, they can identify their career goals and share them with their managers. Managers then have the information they need to keep them engaged in their work and productive at your company.
