Employee engagement is one of the trendiest topics in internal communications. There are many employee engagement trends to consider, whether looking at historical or current statistics, particularly as we transition to a more digital world and workplace.
Even though employee engagement is a problem that businesses face internally, the consequences of lower levels go beyond the confines of the workplace.
We won’t soon be able to stop talking about it due to its effects on work/life balance, employee advocacy, and mental health and wellness.
Continue reading if you’re an internal communicator, manager, leader, or HR professional seeking to increase cohesion within your company through a people-first strategy.
Employee Engagement: What Is It?
Employee engagement is a measure of how a person feels about their job, the firm they work for, and their place within it. Overall, higher performance and better corporate results are correlated with employee engagement.
3 essential elements of workplace engagement
The level of physical and mental effort your employees are willing to put into their work is referred to as physical engagement.
Cognitive engagement assesses how closely employees are tied to their company’s objectives and how this understanding affects the amount of work they must put in to achieve those objectives.
Employee sentiment for their employer is referred to as emotional involvement. Your capacity to succeed as a business depends greatly on providing your employees with a fulfilling and understanding work environment.
Employee engagement is ultimately a highly intricate, multifaceted component of your business strategy. to better comprehend your organization’s main motivators for employee engagement.
Top Trends in Employee Engagement for 2022
Our top 20 employee engagement trends for 2022 have been condensed into this list. Initiatives to increase employee engagement are crucial, but it’s also critical to comprehend the potential reasons why employees could be considering leaving your company.
In order to turn your company into a powerhouse of employee engagement, our list of key variables that contribute to employee disengagement will be examined.
1. Encourage a good work/life balance
Your employees have a lot on their plates, which is one of the biggest lessons to be learned from the shift to remote work. Their capacity to balance their personal and professional obligations is a key factor in how well they can perform their jobs. Your business must assist staff in managing this delicate balancing act if it wants to truly put employee engagement first.
Time management that works starts at the top. If you want your staff to meet deadlines, make sure they are assigned assignments with enough deadlines and the tools they need to finish them. The amount of back-and-forth communication that is necessary for your personnel to be successful should be kept to a minimum.
The flexibility of this balance is the following crucial factor. Give a particularly overburdened employee the time and consideration they need to get back on track. A formula for low engagement includes trying to pressure an employee to achieve deadlines and put work before their duties at home.
2. Encourage a workplace free from stress
The more capable you make your staff in juggling job and personal obligations, the less stressed they’ll be at work. However, employers can take further steps to make sure that their workplace is as stress-free as possible.
In this situation, supervisors must really step forward. They must be fair to the members of their team and answerable to their workers. This doesn’t entail controlling and micromanaging each and every detail of an employee’s job. Instead, managers should identify the circumstances in which their staff members perform at their peak levels of productivity before taking action to establish and sustain such circumstances.
There are many things that cause stress at work, but these three employee engagement numbers are ones that every manager should be aware of:
In terms of work, family, and social activities, 80% of persons with depression indicated some difficulty.
The majority of today’s workers—72%—want companies who support efforts promoting mental health and wellbeing.
83 percent of workers say they are frequently stressed out at work.
The first step in solving an employee problem is to understand it, and communication is essential for this comprehension. Continue reading to find out how your company can determine the issues that are important to your employees.
3. Regularly get employee feedback
Get serious about employee feedback if you’re serious about increasing staff engagement. The greatest way for your company to learn what matters most to its employees and forms the basis of its employee engagement plan is through employee feedback.
There are many different ways to gather employee input. Face-to-face interactions were once the favored option for firms with in-office workers, but as more people are working remotely, internal communicators need to find creative new ways to connect with their staff.
For a number of reasons, using your internal communications to solicit employee feedback is fantastic. Allowing your staff to express their ideas as soon as they receive information helps them concentrate their feedback while the specifics are still vivid in their minds. It also motivates staff members to regularly participate in internal communications because it gives them a chance to provide you feedback. Last but not least, it’s quick and simple and doesn’t involve a protracted back and forth that can be stressful because of uncertainty about how their comments will be received.
These are entertaining techniques to collect feedback from staff members without changing the style or tone of your internal communications. However, employee input is not limited to pre-defined formats. Anonymous employee feedback is useful in this situation.
Your employees can express themselves freely through anonymous feedback without being concerned about being questioned further. They will therefore be more likely to voice their opinions about issues that they find important. The proper facilitation of a stress-free, employee engagement-driven business depends on this open input.
4. Use intelligent internal messaging
Your internal communications strategy has a significant impact on how employee engagement is handled at your company when you step back from specific internal communication material to consider the practice as a whole.
Internal communications have a big impact on how your employees feel about their workplace because of who you send them to, when you send them, how frequently you send them, and what you decide to put in them. A great internal communications strategy will keep your staff informed about the issues that are important to their success while without inundating them with material that is neither required nor superfluous.
An internal communications audit can help you identify the advantages and disadvantages of your internal communications, whether you’re developing your employee email strategy from scratch or are an experienced communications professional fine-tuning a tried-and-true technique. Give internal communications the attention it deserves because they can be a powerful motivator of staff engagement.
5. Provide for your remote and hybrid employees
Currently, 75% of employees claim that working from home increases productivity. The main justifications they give are fewer workplace politics to deal with, fewer distractions, and reduced stress from commuting.
Work From Home has grown by 103% from the year 2005. Keeping that number in mind, it is imperative to have a policy or practice in place.
There may be a notion that remote workers aren’t working nearly as hard because they don’t have to commute and don’t even have to get dressed and look good for the office. However, because they don’t have to leave the house, they typically put in more hours than their brick and mortar employees.
In light of this, it’s critical to recognize and appreciate your staff members’ efforts. If they’re succeeding, letting them know this is a fantastic approach to show them that you value their work just as much as the work of individuals that you often interact with in person.
6. As a manager, be upfront about your expectations
Returning to the second component of employee engagement identified by William Kahn, cognitive engagement, When your employees are clear on the objectives of your company, they bring that clarity to their individual responsibilities and make connections between the minute particulars of their jobs and the overall success of the company and their coworkers. Managers are essential in promoting this clarity.
Nobody wants to assume what their management expects of them. Employees work to discover their place in your company from Day One, and managers have a significant impact on this continuing process.
Managers should always be clear about the objectives of the organization, the specific tasks, and how the two relate to one another. Managers’ communication abilities must be strong, from overseeing the weekly responsibilities of employees to outlining how those tasks contribute to the overall success of the company.
This entails being receptive to employee feedback and considerate of various employee demands. Understanding the specifics of what motivates employees and then implementing those aspects into their management strategy is a major component for improved employee engagement. You can’t force an employee to learn differently than they currently do.
7. Highlight attendance at meetings
There is no justification for excluding remote workers from a meeting that the team members in the physical office are attending. There is a ton of technology available that makes it simple for telecommuters to participate in discussions when concerns and ideas are being explored, such as Zoom.
For remote employees, this lessens feelings of exclusion and isolation. It encourages teamwork and enables remote workers to contribute in real time rather than receiving information after the fact.
8. Make use of social media
What beneficial effects might social media have on employee engagement? Using social media for company has several benefits, one of which is raising employee engagement.
Social media platforms provide venues for discussion and question-and-answer among employees, a place for management to post updates about the organization or its employees, and a more engaging way for internal communicators to distribute information. Social media can contribute to corporate communications in three different ways:
establishing a forum for leaders and the members of their team to express and accept compliments
Internal communications are conducted through a variety of means.
presenting culture and values in a clear, understandable manner
Even if most social media sites are external, it’s still important to consider how you may use them internally. It could be best to start internally before spreading your message publicly; simply consider your objectives.
9. Provide real advantages to employees
For firms and their executives, achieving high levels of employee engagement and retention must be a key focus. It’s not just wonderful for the workers; it’s also great for business.
In fact, companies with the highest levels of employee engagement outperform their rivals in terms of growth in earnings per share by a factor of nearly four. The statistics demonstrate that it is wise for company to pay attention to developments in employee engagement.
While the preceding trends we’ve covered are guaranteed methods to increase employee engagement, providing competitive employee perks is the most straightforward way to do it. There are numerous methods that businesses may make their workplace as appealing as possible for top personnel, including salary, bonuses, vacation days, and stock options. To learn what matters to your employees, try conducting an employee benefits poll.
10. Highlight staff achievements
We discussed the need for managers to be very explicit about what they expect from staff members and how to link individual employee achievements to larger corporate objectives. Recognizing employees for their contributions is even more crucial than ensuring that they comprehend how their work fits into the overall scheme of your company.
Your internal communications should regularly include attempts to recognize your employees. You should frequently recognize your employees’ hard work and contribution to the company, whether it’s in a section devoted to an employee of the month, a section devoted to a particular milestone achievement, or a massive team effort to reach a goal.
Employee pride in their work is aided through employee appreciation. Employees are more inclined to provide creative suggestions for expanding the company’s operations when they care about their work and the benefits it brings to the company. Employee connection and teamwork are emphasized through recognition, which also fosters employee relationships.
11. Foster a culture that values professional and personal growth
Your company should prioritize your employees’ achievement in extracurricular work activities in addition to praising their hard work. Employees may find it difficult to carve out time for projects and programs outside of their regular workday responsibilities due to the time commitment of their jobs.
Try putting in place an employee development program that provides employees with a monthly stipend that they are free to use anyway they see fit. Schedule time for these development programs in employees’ schedules, and encourage managers to follow up with staff to see how they are doing.
There are several advantages to an organizational culture that supports individual employee growth. Employees are given a vacation from the routine of their regular jobs so they can learn something vital to them. They’ll learn a brand-new talent that will help them progress in their personal or professional lives. Additionally, they will feel encouraged by their employer who has shown them that they are appreciated for reasons other than what they do to the company.
12. Gender equality, diversity, and female empowerment
Because no workforce is homogeneous, it is precisely our differences that make us successful as a group, an organization, and a society. Initiatives in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion enable organizations to celebrate the distinctive makeup of their workforce.
Knowing the disparities among your workforce also entails recognizing the various challenges they confront. The societal problems that women, people of color, persons with disabilities, and other oppressed groups face should be deeply understood by businesses. Be sensitive to these groups’ struggles, inform your entire workforce about these problems, and offer areas and services for individuals who require assistance.
Taking an active role in DEI will not only increase employee engagement at your company, it will also increase its appeal to a talent pool that is becoming more and more diverse. There’s no need to limit the future of your company by overlooking the crucial role that a diverse team had in its first success.
13. Arrange social events to strengthen links between coworkers
Employee engagement is the sense of belonging individuals have to their employer and to one another, and it’s crucial to foster these connections. Employees may get isolated from one another due to the increased number of remote workers by only communicating during Zoom meetings, where the topic of conversation is frequently the current project.
Planning time and events for workers to interact with one another becomes even more crucial as a result. Giving your staff the chance to get to know one another will foster satisfying working connections, whether you do this by introducing a meet-up program using Zoom, holding lunch and learns, or organizing regular in-person events.
When asking for assistance or guidance, coworkers who are friends face less obstacles. Strong ties amongst coworkers make it less intimidating to ask a question or make a comment. And a company that places a high priority on team-building exercises demonstrates that worker happiness is as vital to production.
Visit our article on the finest employee engagement ideas for a comprehensive list of employee activities to foster positive working connections.
14. Establish a reliable onboarding procedure for new hires
Starting at a new company may be a stressful and time-consuming process for everyone involved, not just the new employee. When they first start off, new employees are given a ton of information, and they are expected to sort through it all to identify what information is genuinely crucial and what information they will only need to look to once every 15 months. Good companies are aware of this difficulty and offer services to aid new hires in settling in as fast as feasible.
For several reasons, you should treat your new hire onboarding process seriously. It will also lessen the amount of effort that existing employees have to undertake to assist your new employees in settling in by assisting new hires in understanding their duties and responsibilities. When employees are informed about how they fit into the organization and what their work means, a great onboarding process helps foster cognitive engagement from the start.
15. Offer opportunities for career advancement
The possibility of advancement is essential for both employee engagement and well-being. Employees must feel like they are making progress in their careers and personal life in order to find purpose in their work.
We talked about how personal development programs give workers practical skills that prepare them for greater difficulties in life. Opportunities for job advancement function similarly, giving workers attainable objectives they can work toward.
Again, this has to do with cognitive employee engagement. Businesses should educate staff members about the opportunities accessible to them right away. As they strive toward a goal that is personally significant to them, these goals will inspire employees to perform at their highest level.
16. Identify the elements that influence employee engagement
Employee engagement is a complicated, multifaceted evaluation of what motivates workers to put effort into their work. Businesses may assess a number of things that influence overall employee engagement even though there isn’t a single metric that does it completely.
We’ve talked about using employee surveys and feedback to assess employee engagement and get fresh insights into what might be done better. Employee surveys are one more component of assessing employee engagement that is very telling of whether a worker is engaged or not. Surveys can gauge two things: the likelihood that employees will refer customers to your company’s product or service and the likelihood that they will refer friends and family who are seeking for work to your company. Even though it’s not all-inclusive, this one indicator can provide you with a wealth of information on how your employees see your company. A valuable KPI for your employee engagement plan can be made from survey data. But make sure to add employee feedback and other employee engagement metrics to your results.
17. Make mental health a priority
A Gallup poll found that 62% of engaged workers believe their jobs have a favorable impact on their physical health. Unfortunately, loneliness at work is on the rise. Lack of support and camaraderie among employees causes them to feel less a part of their organizations and jobs.
Your workforce experiences a time of employee disengagement when employee morale is low, and personnel frequently begin looking for new employment. Many businesses offer wellness programs to help their staff members reduce stress in order to combat this. These consist of:
- classes in stress management
- sessions of on-site meditation
- massage tables
An employee experience survey is one way to gather important information on employee mental health. This kind of survey inquires about the workplace climate, work-life balance, and general satisfaction with the business. It offers a thorough evaluation of both the physical and virtual employee experience.
18. Identify spokespersons for employee involvement
Trying to kickstart your staff engagement efforts might be challenging. Employees may choose not to take part in engagement activities, even if they are engaging or relevant to them, particularly in workplaces with low employee engagement. A spokesperson for employee engagement can assist in launching your efforts and inspire others to get involved.
Ask a highly engaged employee whether they would be interested in leading an engagement effort. Encourage them to invite their coworkers to the event, outline the details, and set aside time for everyone to attend. Always make attendance optional, however, lest you undermine the goal of the project.
Your staff engagement initiatives will appear more natural and less forced as a result than if they were simply given orders from above. Your spokesperson might motivate other staff members to participate by expressing their enthusiasm for the occasion or activity.
19. Encourage the leadership to go above and beyond
Employees at larger firms may frequently feel cut off from people who make decisions that have an impact on their work. By directly participating in internal communications and employee engagement programs, leadership may address this mismatch.
Encourage the C-suite to participate in or publicize the event if you’re organizing a social function. CEO-authored articles and videos are featured by leadership communications. Attempts to humanize leadership and put a face on authority can greatly improve how attached employees feel to their jobs and workplaces.
20. Pay proper attention to employee offboarding
Offboarding procedures are essential for employee engagement, much like onboarding does. A wealth of information regarding the employees’ stay at your company can be gleaned from effective offboarding procedures. Additionally, they can offer an objective evaluation of what worked and what can be improved, which will ultimately reinforce your attempts to increase employee engagement.
Think about include an employee exit survey in your offboarding procedure. How many departing employees are eager to share their thoughts on their time working for your company may surprise you.
Prioritize employee engagement in your workplace
People want to work for organizations that value them as people, not only for what they can do to the company. Employees want to be themselves at work and understand who they are working for.
They want to know that they can rely on their jobs for assistance if life throws them a curveball. They want to believe that their company is involved in them when they are ready to advance in their professions.
Making your employees your first priority will only lead to more success for your business. By adhering to best practices for employee engagement, you can demonstrate to your staff that you appreciate openness in internal interactions and that there is no reason why you can’t meet their needs.
