Top

5 Habits That Are Stalling Your Employee Engagement Program

April 2, 2018

Category:

What does it take to become a high-performing organization of the future?

Today’s employees won’t just settle for compensation and job security – they are looking for companies that can can provide a culture, a sense of purpose, and the promise of future prospects. It’s no longer a generational thing, it’s a workforce thing. And yet, traditional methods of engaging and retaining employees are still going strong. Are companies ready to adapt and revamp their entire employee engagement strategy?

Take a look at the these five habits that undermine today’s organizations’ employee engagement and retention strategies and see how you can build a stronger workplace where employees can thrive.

  1. The Annual Survey

The problem with annual engagement surveys is that they often fall short when it comes to generating focused, business-relevant results. For one, results often take weeks, and sometimes even months, to make it to the HR team and general manager, which makes acting on the post-survey momentum impossible. And then there’s the issue of how annual survey results are structured – in the form of static, heavily detailed reports. While they do provide leaders with some general insight, they fail to explore the actual work dynamic of the office and the trends that can lead to retention or performance issues.

The solution? Frequent, regular measurement and tracking of your most important metrics and real-time dashboards for things like sales, marketing, and finance. Tracking metrics allows you to spot and remediate issues in real time. Plus, “the way employees feel about their work changes throughout the year, and many engagement drivers are far more dynamic than the annual engagement survey can measure.

HR leaders at high-performing organizations are taking a page from the book of their executive peers and implementing real-time people dashboards. They gather frequent, comprehensive engagement data, so they have visibility into current status and trends, and empower the HR team, leaders, and managers to track progress and course correct in real time as well.”

Marketo for instance, a global leader in marketing automation, implemented quarterly measurement with data that was analyzed instantly as results came in. Now, frequent employee feedback enables their HR teams to quickly respond to challenges and employee needs in real time, rather than months later.

  1.  The “One-Size-Fits-All” Strategy

Or better yet, the one-size-fits-none strategy. Even within a single organization, you will find a diverse mix of individuals. And each and every one of them will have different drivers and motivational factors that lead them to higher level of engagement. Organizations that understand this, will be much better equipped to identify each individual’s goals and take targeted action to respond to their unique challenges and requirements.

Today’s high-performing organizations are embracing technologies that are allowing them to better understand and motivate their employees. For instance, Artificial Intelligence programs that analyze team data automatically, and provide recommendations for boosting engagement based on factors like high and low scores, benchmark data, correlations of drivers with key outcomes, and past trends. These programs enable organizations to have an ongoing impact on the engagement and performance of their teams.

  1. Leaving the Manager Out of Employee Engagement

If you move towards a more localized approach for employee engagement, like the one we talked about in the previous paragraph, then engagement data cannot be used solely by HR and the C-Suite – it should also reach the management level. “Managers are employees’ strongest link between their day-to-day activities and the organizational vision. They’re the best equipped to understand the motivations, goals, and challenges faced by their people, and to take the most effective action to improve engagement. Leaving them out of the equation, or excusing them from their responsibility, is recipe for the status quo.”

FICO, an analytics software company that helps businesses drive higher levels of growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction, implemented a strategy that provided managers with more granular engagement data, allowing them to explore, analyze, and better understand the engagement dynamics on their teams. As a result, managers were able to take ownership of engagement and employees felt more valued.

  1. Leaving the Employee Out of Employee Engagement

There’s a reason today’s employees prefer informal checkings to annual reviews. Informal checkings give the employee the chance to have a contextual conversation with the manager, discuss challenges and provide feedback on solutions. More so, frequent conversations with employees provide an opportunity for ongoing feedback at all levels of the organization. “When these conversations take place at every level, on a regular basis, employee engagement becomes a part of the organization’s toolkit.” Just imagine a world where engagement results become a standard part of monthly status reports, and engagement conversations a regular dialogue that sustains a work environment where employees can thrive.

  1. Fixing Engagement Challenges for Former Employees

The “don’t burn bridges – you’ll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river” maxim is one of the main reasons departing employees have little incentive to be honest. So how can employers get a better sense of why people quit? Or, better yet, how can they tell when their people are likely to leave, or underperform? By harnessing the power of predictive analytics. “Early warning systems, like alerts and automated insights, which identify patterns, predict outcomes, and surface key improvement areas are helping organizations keep employee engagement problems from becoming employee retention and performance problems.