Keep Teams Focused: Employee Engagement Strategies That Work
Distractions in the modern workplace are at an all-time high, from personal responsibilities and constant notifications to global events that pull focus away from work.
April 18th, 2023 – SkillCycle
Employers and employees benefit from workplaces that provide recognition, connection, and a healthy culture. These are key components to retention—people stay with companies where they feel valued. In fact, keeping your employees happy may be the key to keeping them, period.
Why should you pay close attention to how your employees feel about work? Over the past few years, companies have undergone “extraordinary workforce disruption,” according to Harvard Business Review (HBR), driving nearly half the workforce to consider quitting their jobs.
Absorbing the cost of attrition at that level would be a massive blow for most organizations. When we recall that the potential cost of replacing an employee can be one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary, the impact on companies already facing organizational challenges such as talent shortages and supply chain disruption looms large.
How can you ensure your organization creates an environment that will make employees want to stay? It starts with helping them reach a feeling of worklife success and ensuring you offer the tools and opportunities needed to grow this feeling over time.
Worklife success is personal and may look different depending on an individual’s goals. Employees want to feel valued and that their work is purposeful. But worklife success depends greatly on the employer as well and if they’re providing a clear path towards professional growth — a major deciding factor in an employee’s intentions to stay. Support for growth comes in many forms, including culture, learning and development, and goal alignment between their personal ambitions and the ambitions of the company.
People are motivated to choose work opportunities that support their health and happiness. According to the 2022 Work Trend Index Annual Report from Microsoft, 53% of employees are more likely to prioritize their health and well-being over work than before the pandemic.
Most people also want to work for a company that shares their values and helps them feel like their work matters daily. They need to be able to work towards achieving personal objectives both personally and at work.
And, they want to know their managers care about their well-being enough to improve working conditions and remove obstacles that block them from doing their best.
You can offer a safe and welcoming workplace, compensation, and benefit plans that recognize and reward performance, and relevant and continual learning opportunities that help people grow and gain valuable skills.
Meaningful change can’t be a quick or superficial fix. Most of us know that employee well-being matters. Globally, four in five HR leaders report that mental health and well-being are top priorities for their organization, according to McKinsey.
Additionally, companies need to make sure they’re solving the right problems. Unless you bring solutions to the causes of burnout and frustration in the workplace, employees are unlikely to feel genuinely supported.
Helping your employees achieve worklife success will mean addressing organizational and systemic issues and helping them connect how their work affects the company’s goals.
You’ll need to find the right combination of tools, culture, and development opportunities to help grow your organization. To better understand where to focus your efforts and investment, here are three areas where you’re likely to see measurable results.
Employees who feel disconnected from their work and underappreciated are likely to be less engaged in the work they do. This disconnection can drive performance down, costing the company time and money.
On the other hand, when you create opportunities for employees to achieve their personal and professional goals, their connection to their work will grow stronger. This engagement, in turn, will drive better performance and profitability.
If your people are leaving, it’s a good sign there’s a disconnect between what you’re offering and what they want on the job. Employees are more likely to stay when they see that their work is connected to the success of the business and the company values their contributions.
It’s helpful to remember that in most cases, employees aren’t leaving because of an unwillingness to work. Instead, they’re more likely to be leaving because of poor leadership or because they feel disconnected from the organization’s purpose and mission.
Employee performance is what ultimately drives company performance. If your organization isn’t meeting its goals, it’s likely there’s untapped potential in your human capital.
The good news is that if you can unlock this potential and improve worklife success for your employees, over time you’re likely to see the company make more progress toward its goals in sales, revenue, or profitability.
While caring for your employees’ happiness on the job and removing systemic causes of frustrations are important, pay close attention to how you’re developing your people.
Learning and development are critical to demonstrate how you value your team members and to keep them from leaving their jobs. How critical? Research shows a lack of opportunities for career development and advancement was the number one reason workers considered quitting their jobs.
It’s imperative to offer employees relevant learning opportunities connected to their work. This means training should increase skills that are valued in their jobs and important to the company’s ability to succeed. This creates a tangible connection between increasing their skills and watching opportunities open up within and outside the company because of the effort they’ve put into growing their capabilities.
It’s also important to create time and space for ongoing learning that doesn’t add to their workload or make their job harder. Learning and development opportunities should be seen as valuable ways to make workdays more efficient or to help employees achieve their goals and those of the company.
Creating worklife success for your employees is vital to your ability to attract and retain talented employees with the skills you need for the company to succeed. If you can’t offer it, you won’t create a culture that draws top talent and rewards your best team members in ways they value.
Ready to begin building improved worklife success in your organization? Learn more about the strategies you’ll need in our whitepaper: Learning & Development is Broken: Ditch the Outdated Approach and Start Tackling the Right Problems.
Interested in speaking with a member of our team to learn more? Request a demo here.
