Leaders: Get ready for the ‘Great Reengagement’

One of the biggest risks to engagement is an employee feeling disconnected from the wider group and/or broader company initiatives. When employees feel that they are the last to know about something, morale suffers. Many successful employee-experience (EX) programs are a dual effort of HR and marketing.

One HR and marketing initiative that is proven to increase employee engagement and even a company’s brand and employer awareness is an employee advocacy program. By having a portal—or one from a vendor that provides the software—employees can see all the company’s news and content and have pre-written social captions to use for their own social posts.

As a result, employees feel connected, and the employer grows its brand. 

Engagement Teams don’t only manage internal communications to ensure employees are well informed, they can also identify the best training programs, onboarding paths, wellness initiatives, benefits communications, contests, surveys, and performance review processes. An engagement team is invaluable for training the entire company on the importance of employee engagement and truly live it each day. If there was ever a time to make the case for an engagement team, it’s now.

Often referred to as stay interviews, engagement interviews can help managers have open conversations with their team about what’s working and what’s not. Run completely outside of performance reviews and formal processes, engagement interviews are candid conversations between a manager and their teammate to identify areas of opportunity, areas of concern, and areas each person can improve on to have a successful relationship and career trajectory.

To properly use engagement interviews for engagement—and not a bureaucratic ploy—HR (or an engagement team) can arm managers with the types of questions that work well in these engagements such as:

• What do you look forward to when you come to work each day?
• What do you like most or least about working here?
• What keeps you working here?
• If you could change something about your job, what would that be?
• What would you like to learn here?
• What motivates (or demotivates) you?
• What can I do to best support you?
• What can I do more of or less as your manager?

One of the reasons for resignation and reassessment is people want to feel that their work matters—in their lives, in their communities, in their companies. With all the health, economic, and political turmoil of the last few years, this reassessment came from employees taking stock of what matters most to them. Employers need to address those questions proactively through the lens of reengagement.

A third of employers don’t give employees the opportunity to connect to the causes they care about, despite employees looking favourably upon companies that do. At its core, engagement is about providing a sense that someone belongs. By giving employees the opportunity to show the types of groups and causes to which they belong—through corporate giving and volunteering programs—they could feel like they belong at work as well.

A single system for all work functions is the top technology employees say they are missing to do their jobs most effectively. While all of the engagement initiatives described here are proven to be successful, they will all fall flat unless employees are given the tools to access what they need in a single system without requiring myriad passwords and having to log into this system for this and that system for that.

HR and business leaders must think and re-think how to consolidate siloed systems into a single source of truth for employees.