When the concept of employee engagement was introduced, no one could have realized its significance in today’s times. The significance of employee experience is at par with customer experience, and as a business strategy, it has always been a key concern among top leaders and human resources managers. For, the impact of employee motivation managementon business strategies is not just limited to fetching better outcomes for an organization. Employee engagement is vital to the longevity of an organization; it is essentially a business imperative.
For employee engagement strategies to work, it is crucial to first pinpoint your biggest HR challenges like low morale, employee disengagement, reduced productivity, etc. Once the challenges are clear, it becomes easier to understand the engagement strategy goals.
What is the goal of employee engagement strategies?
Articulating clear, measurable, and achievable goals is the first step to building successful employee engagement strategies. These goals offer direction to employee engagement plans and help quantify their success later on. The most common goals are:
· Boost productivity
· Reduce absenteeism rates
· Boost retention
· Boost employee happiness
· Boost satisfaction
· Enrich organizational culture
All of these goals are critical to building a workforce that is fully engaged. However, it is important to choose the right goals for your organization, by thoroughly conducting an audit and measuring the employee engagement level. The goals you choose help in determining your course of action to achieve them.
What should be your budget for the employee engagement program?
A strategic program for employee engagement needs a properly planned-out investment of resources and time. While it is not wise to drastically commit a considerable part of your budget to an employee motivation managementprogram, it is also unrealistic to believe that you cannot quantify the ROI of such a program. A reasonable balance needs to be established between the probable ROI that you are targeting and the funds and time that you allocate.
Studies show that the ideal is to invest about 1 percent or more of the payroll in a recognition and rewards program. With this level of investment, organizations are more likely to outshine others who do not invest as much. However, it is worth noting that this budget is only for programs that involve rewards and recognition, not every strategy.
How to build an employee engagement strategy?
When you build an employee engagement plan, you need to be particularly strategic such that every plan you invest in precisely addresses a real issue in your organization.
At the very start, you need to identify clearly the core drivers or critical areas of employee engagement. The core areas of a long-term employee engagement strategy include career growth, diversity, and belonging, leadership, work-life balance and wellness, rewards and recognition, compensation and benefits, communication and team, workplace security and safety, work performance, goals, and mission, etc. The right engagement drivers will accurately respond to the most burning HR issues in your company.
Once this is done, you need to chart out actionable plans to drive value out of these core elements. It is also vital to identify the pain points of your employees to create customized initiatives. An employee engagement softwareapplication to conduct surveys, and capture and track their feedback is a worthy investment. You can also consider speaking with your employees across all departments and hierarchies to acquire useful insights into their expectations from the workplace. For instance, if you consider wellness and work-life balance, there are multiple ways to express it. But there should be specific initiatives in place, like half-day off on Fridays, yoga sessions at the office, flexible work timings, credits for gym memberships and other wellness activities, etc.
Then once these initiatives are planned out, it is time to prioritize and execute them accordingly. Here, you also have to remember that some strategies will demand more time and funds, so make sure which ones you roll out first. The best way forward is to further break down specific plans into smaller initiatives. You can even consider investing in employee engagement software to streamline your plans and build an employee-first culture.
Conclusion
Today, as the global workforce undergoes major changes, employee experience and engagement strategies will be of primary focus to top leaders and managers. Especially at a time when the world is witness to “The Great Resignation”, employee engagement strategies will be critical to the success of organizations.
