Introduction

While the majority of businesses, if not all, want their employees to be happy, they still put profitability first over employee happiness. However, there is increasing evidence showing that there is a direct link between employee engagement and higher profitability. In fact, businesses with happy and therefore engaged employees outperform the competition by 20%. 

In today’s article, we’re going to explain what talent management is, what drives employee engagement, as well as share with you some of the best employee engagement strategies to ensure your workforce is happy. Let’s start off with a talent management definition. 

What is talent engagement? 

Talent engagement is about attracting candidates with the right skills and attitude to your organization, and ensuring that both your current and future employees engage, understand, and can relate to your business goals and principles. In order to measure employee engagement, organizations turn to employee engagement rate, i.e., the perceived commitment an employee displays towards an organization. There are several metrics that can be applied to measure the employee engagement rate, for instance, NPS, absenteeism, and turnover rates. 

Now that you know what talent engagement is, let’s take a look at the factors which impact it. 

What drives engagement?

There are many engagement drivers that decide upon whether your employees are satisfied and engaged at work. We will focus on the three most common ones.

Management/Leadership 

According to the 2019 Employee Engagement Trends Report by Quantum Workplace, the second most important engagement driver is trusting senior leadership. Frequently, one of the reasons why employees are disengaged is the lack of trust in management. As it’s the management and C-suite that set the direction in which the organization is supposed to go, if employees don’t trust senior leadership, they won’t commit to fulfilling business goals.  

Meaningful work

Employees want to feel their work matters. Deloitte revealed that 42% of the respondents surveyed sought new job opportunities because they couldn’t make good use of their skills and abilities in their current workplace. What’s more, those who planned to change jobs mentioned lack of career progression (37%) and their job not being challenging enough (27%) as the two main factors impacting their career decisions. Employees, especially the most skilled ones, want to feel their work contributes to a greater goal, and that they can put their skills to good use. Without this conviction, they won’t be able to fully commit to work. 

Liking your co-workers 

We spend a lot of time at work, so it’s not surprising that one of the engagement drivers is the relationship we have with our co-workers. In a survey conducted by SHRM, 41% of employees admitted that it was a very important factor that impacts their job satisfaction. A good relationship with your fellow employees leads to loyalty and fellowship. They enjoy spending time together and don’t want to disappoint each other, which makes them work harder. 

What are the reasons for employee disengagement? 

Gallup has found that in 2019 the employee engagement rate has reached 35%, which is the record high since they started measuring it in 2000. Yet still, 13% of the American workforce remains actively disengaged, and for this reason, it’s worth looking at the main employee disengagement factors. However, before we do so, let’s explain what “actively disengaged” indicates. These are the employees who act to the company’s detriment. For example, they monopolize their manager’s time, tend to have more job accidents, take a lot of sick leave, and display a higher quit rate. 

What causes employees to become actively disengaged? 

Poor leadership

Earlier in this post, we mentioned the importance of management for employee engagement rate. Poor leadership negatively impacts employee commitment – only 42% of workers trust their boss. This, to an extent, explains why there are so many disengaged employees. 

Lack of feedback

Employees like to feel their work is valued, and there is no better way to show appreciation than through regular feedback. Those who don’t receive feedback tend to work less hard – 96% of employees say they want to hear it regularly. It’s important to note that feedbacking should go beyond annual performance reviews as “there's no way to get better at something you only hear about once a year” - Daniel Pink. 

Lack of career growth opportunities

Lack of career growth opportunities is one of the most common reasons for switching jobs. On the contrary, good career growth prospects is one of the most important factors for staying with the current employer. This criterion plays a particularly crucial role if the majority of your workforce are Millennials – since 87% of them admit that career development is very important to them. 

Dissatisfaction with benefits and pay

In a study on job switching conducted by Indeed, over half of respondents reported they changed employers primarily because they felt dissatisfied with their salaries. Among other factors, they also mentioned inflexible schedules and long commutes, which contrasted with the offers they were presented with by their future employers.

Not having access to the right resources 

Employees feel frustrated if they lack access to the right tools and resources. If they feel that it’s virtually impossible to fulfill standards set by their managers, they will lose motivation and feel detached from your organization’s goals.

The best employee engagement strategies you can use 

Let us now review several methods that you can apply to boost your employee engagement.

Strategy 1: Survey your employees (and candidates)

Employees who have a way of providing feedback to management report that they are 4.6 times as likely to perform at their best. Surveys are one very effective way of giving them the chance to voice their opinions.

Using surveys, you can collect feedback regarding any policies, processes, or faulty workflows that may stand behind employee disengagement or that might cause them frustration. They are also a great way of continuously collecting improvement suggestions. For example, if your company is considering introducing a new service or internal process, you can quickly run a survey to collect input from your employees and evaluate the idea.

Surveys can also be used to collect feedback from your job applicants to boost the candidate experience and attract better talent. 

Here are some types of surveys we suggest you include in your talent engagement strategy:

• Employee satisfaction survey (for instance, the previously-mentioned eNPS)
• Training needs’ survey
• Training evaluation survey
• Recruitment feedback survey

Strategy 2: Conduct quality audits

Quality monitoring might not be the first thing that comes to mind as far as employee engagement tactics are concerned, however, it’s another important engagement driver. It serves not only as a way to evaluate the quality of work but also to help your employees feel more fulfilled in their role. 

Use a Quality Monitoring solution to conduct employee performance reviews and see whether there’s anything you can do to help them be better at their job. By incorporating it into your business, you will reveal improvement potential on an employee and business level, which translates to people receiving support, coaching, and training to further develop their skills. As a result, your employees will feel heard, which will improve morale and boost their motivation.

Strategy 3: Conduct regular meetings with employees

Scheduling regular meetings between the employee and HR (or their direct managers) will give you the opportunity to track employee satisfaction over time. It will also serve as a way to find out if there’s anything your company can do better and include in the employee engagement strategy. 

Apart from regular checkups, you should also make sure to schedule meetings whenever you see a drop in engagement or receive a poor employer evaluation in a survey. Certain solutions, such as Intersoft, will even help you predict employee flight risk based on the employee data available to management, such as their communication with clients or a drop in metrics (which we discuss further in the next point).

Strategy 4: Monitor your employees’ performance over time

Last, but not least, it’s imperative that you use a tool that will help you track and visualize employee performance. If you see a drop in any metrics, for instance, lower scores in customer service evaluation surveys, a longer-than-average time to resolve tickets, or a decrease in the volume of customer calls, this can point to two occurrences:

• A per-employee issue – for example, an employee feeling burnout or a drop in motivation due to the lack of a career path
• A cross-team issue (for instance, a newly implemented process turned out to be counterproductive and needs to be fixed ASAP)

Insights & Reports tools will be a great supplement to your quality monitoring efforts, as no serious issue will go unnoticed.

Summary 

Employee engagement is a factor deeply connected to any organization’s success. Without the right approach towards talent management, your employees will feel unmotivated, detached from your team, and might eventually seek new employment. In order to ensure that these risks don’t come to fruition, you must have an employee engagement strategy in place. Use a solution like Intersoft to track employee engagement rates, collect feedback from your employees, and to support them in their goals.

If you’d like to learn more about how to create your talent engagement strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out!