To grow your business and ensure it retains the competitive edge, your company needs to have excellent employee engagement. Humans like to feel understood, and your employees aren’t any different. You need to give them a purpose and make them feel their work is creating an impact.
By listening to them and tapping into their humanistic desires, you can boost employee engagement in your company. If you fail to listen to your employees or neglect the dropping levels of engagement, it won’t be long before your employees start leaving. And when that happens, recruiting new employees often to fill the open roles could be a big burden on your resources.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2022 report, low engagement alone sets the global economy back by a whopping $7.8 trillion.
Disengaged employees will also create problems with absenteeism, which will hit your company’s productivity hard. When tasks and projects fail to be completed within the planned or promised timelines and the work quality plummets, it will reflect badly on your company.
Not listening to employees and failing to seek their feedback or considering their opinions could even mean wasting precious time and resources. That’s because when you invest effort, resources, and time into initiatives employees might not care about, it will all be a waste.
Though every company is different, there are some common parameters regarding what employees usually look for in their workplace. As an employer, it’s important you listen to them and take note of their feedback and opinion to customize your internal initiatives accordingly.
Here are three types of employee feedback your company just can’t ignore:
1. Employees Desiring More Dialogues with Their Company
In today’s unstable economic environment, engaged employees are considered extremely valuable. Open and frequent communication helps build stronger relationships, thus contributing toward improved employee engagement and organisational progress.
That’s why if employees desire to be able to give feedback to you (as their employer) through surveys and get more feedback from their managers, your company shouldn’t neglect what they want.
By offering employees the opportunity to give feedback, you can strengthen their ties to the company and its people, and even contribute to a sense of purpose and value. And when you make employees feel valued and heard at work, you help them become more engaged and productive, which affects your overall business outcomes positively.
2. Meeting Employee Priorities Even Though They Differ From HR’s
As their end goals differ, employees and HR will always have different priorities. For instance, employees usually prioritise protecting their health (both physical and mental) and overall well-being. Thus, you will find their focus is on health, safety, recognition, engagement, retention, overall well-being, training and development, and growth opportunities.
Priorities of HR could typically include talent acquisition, onboarding, recruitment cost control, change management, DE&I initiatives, productivity, performance management, and building critical skills and competencies.
Though HR and employees tend to be “selfish” in their priorities as their end goals differ, you can still find a middle way where both work together to take the company forward.
Since several employee priorities can help improve HR’s priorities directly, investing time, resources, and effort into ensuring employee priorities are met, despite being different from HR’s priorities, can benefit both parties and boost employee engagement.
3. Putting More Emphasis on Team Meetings than One-on-One Meetings
One-on-one meetings will always remain vital to give employees more feedback on their performance and address their problems or work issues, if any. However, recent data indicate that both employees and HR believe team meetings are more vital to their company than one-on-one meetings.
As an employer, you should ensure not to prioritise one-on-ones over team meetings as personal performance and building strong workplace relationships are both crucial factors in boosting employee engagement.
Final Words
It’s time to start listening to your employees if you aren’t doing it already. By listening to what they have to say, taking their feedback and opinion seriously, and acting on them fast, you can improve business outcomes and even make work a more pleasant day-to-day experience for your employees.
Go ahead and evaluate whether your employees are feeling heard and valued currently or not. If they aren’t, you should brainstorm with your core management team to set things right to ensure poor employee engagement doesn’t do irreversible damage to your company.
This article was written by Sonali