When you think about it, employee engagement has a lot to do with what drives most people to do their best. We all have certain needs that keep us interested in anything that we’re doing for a long time. Employees need the same things and if organizations tend to those needs, there’s a good chance their employees will pay them back with loyalty and hard work.
Here are some of the recent trends in engagement that seem to hit the mark with employees time and again.
1. Growth: If an employee doesn’t feel like they’re learning something new, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll get bored and start wondering if the grass is greener somewhere else. In a Forbes.com article written by Meghan Biro, called, Developing Your Employees Is The Key To Retention — Here Are 4 Smart Ways To Start, “According to LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report, a whopping 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers.” So helping employees to grow and improve isn’t just a fancy frill that organizations might consider giving to employees, it’s expected by today’s talent.
2. Recognition: Employees are a bit like plants. Give them attention in the form of sunshine, water, and fertilizer and watch them bloom. But take away all of those things, and they wilt. Every employee blooms when they’re noticed for their contributions to the organization. But, when employees work for months and years without being seen, they feel invisible and their workplace engagement drops. Smart organizations know this, so when employees work hard, they make sure to pat them on the back – and not just once or twice, but regularly!
3. Purpose: Tell an employee that they’re expected to weld a bit together for an aircraft company and most employees will feel like a robot on an assembly line. But tell that same employee that bit is part of the engine of a high performance aircraft that safely transports thousands of people a year, from different parts of the world, and see the light in their eyes. We all like to know that what we’re doing has an impact on the world because it makes our work meaningful to us. In an article on Forbes.com called, Employees Need Purpose More Than Pay To Be Happy And Productive, Danielle Brooker writes, “people care about having a purpose more than pay, and this has direct consequences for organizational productivity and retention.
4. Welcoming feedback and ideas: Teams that work in organizations are like families. Each team is made up of different personalities with different insights, ideas, and needs. If those differences aren’t acknowledged, it can cause trouble. On the surface, things may appear all right, but underneath there can be a lot of resentment that can lead to sabotaging the family dynamic and/or total destruction of the group. If an organization wants hard working staff to stay there, they’re wise to listen to what their employees have to say.
As noted on the Corporaterebels.com website in an article called, Why the Command Command-and-Control Mindset Is Killing Your Company, written by Joost, the boss that told employees what to do and wasn’t interested in their thoughts or ideas, is just about extinct. When businesses run things as they always have and don’t work at changing and getting better, they can pay a very high price for it. “Organizations like Kodak, Blackberry, Motorola, Lehman Brothers, and Enron are but a few of the many companies that became overly comfortable and lost their battle,” said Joost. So listening to employees can literally save your organization.
