Tag: employee engagement

Performance Management: Post COVID Changes To Get Used To

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new. – Socrates

Remote work is not the only aspect of change in the past year. COVID-19 has made sure that everything that was once normal is not so anymore. So we at Engagedly sought to understand these changes (esp. with performance management), how they are impacting us today and whether these changes are permanent. 

We surveyed to understand the situation better and bring to you information that will help you improve employee engagement and learning. 

In the previous edition, People Development Goes Virtual and More Feedback Focused, we discussed how the pandemic has impacted learning and development, and feedback. In this edition, we will discuss the comprehensive overview. 

The Performance Management Survey: 

We asked leaders from 5 key industries to report the degree of change for different performance management processes. They were to report whether or not each of the performance management processes was occurring more or less frequently during COVID-19. 

They responded on a five-point scale (1= significantly less frequent and 5 = significantly more frequent).

What did we find?

Overall, 20% of respondents were very satisfied with the changes they experienced related to performance management and people development processes. These are the leaders that reported being very satisfied (5, on a 1-5 point likert scale measuring satisfaction) with the changes to performance management and people processes that they experienced due to COVID-19. 

Taking a deeper look into those who were very satisfied with the changes provides some additional insights to guide future initiatives. 

Also read: Performance Management Gone Virtual and More Progressive

When asked, “What specific process change(s) to people development had the biggest impact on your satisfaction?” There were a few key themes that surfaced: 

  • Improved training technologies/processes 
  • More frequent and accessible trainings for employees 
  • Breadth of training offered 

When asked, “What specific process change(s) to performance had the biggest impact on your satisfaction?” Here were a few key themes that surfaced: 

  • Incentivizing/recognizing employees for good/improved performance and adherence to new policies 
  • Checking in more frequently with employees about performance and asking them how they were doing personally as well (well-being) 
  • Optimization of systems and technology 
  • Transitioning back to the in-person work environment and work schedules Investments in technologies 
  • Supporting the more flexible work environment and coordinating the work of the team(s) 
Also read: Know How to Make Employee Feedback Work

We are still amidst the fog of COVID and its remote work environment when it comes to most of the workplaces in the US. It still remains to be seen if these changes are widespread permanence or if they will be more industry-specific. While we do anticipate that there will be some retrenchment to the old way of managing Performance and Learning & Development but it seems quite likely that we will not go back to pre-February 2020 days. 

When looking at the data and insights we can always learn a lot from those that are doing well, or have had a favorable experience. Though our natural tendency is to fix the broken parts, sometimes a fix is as easy as replicating or copying where things are working well. These lessons can come easily from both internal and external sources. All we need to do is be mindful of this fact, and stay curious.

Want to view the detailed report? Click here.

 

Want to know how Engagedly can help you with implementing continuous feedback? Then request for a live demo

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5 Employee Engagement Activities to Revive Your Workforce

Employee engagement has different meanings to different people. Some say engaged employees means enthusiastic employees, while others believe it means happy or satisfied employees. But employee engagement doesn’t mean employee happiness; neither does it mean employee satisfaction. A happy employee will not necessarily be the most productive or hardworking employee. A satisfied employee might not go that extra mile on his/her own to achieve excellence.

Employee engagement is the emotional commitment employees have towards organizations that influences their behavior and level of effort in work. In other words, engaged employees care about their work and their organization.

Study reveals 81% of employees who do not feel engaged at the workplace would consider leaving the organization today if the right place calls. What is more staggering is, disengaged employees cost U.S. companies up to $550 billion a year.

So how do you create a work environment where employees care about your company? Following are some employee engagement activities to boost morale of your employees.

1. Create a Feedback Culture

One of the best ways to level up employee morale and create a positive work environment is by providing feedback frequently. According to Forbes, 40% of employees who hardly receive any feedback from their managers are actively disengaged. And 43% of highly engaged employees receive feedback at least once a week.

Feedback culture is a workplace culture that focuses on feedback between employees and employers. It’s a culture where every employee feels they have the right to voice their opinions and their work doesn’t go unnoticed. This culture is helpful in keeping employees motivated, active, and engaged.

Engagedly is a comprehensive employee engagement software that uses a 360-degree feedback system. It allows you and your employees to provide feedback and even ask for feedback.

2. Recognize Your Employees’ Effort

By recognizing your employees’ contributions you encourage them to bring out their best at work, every day.

Lack of recognition highly affects employee morale, productivity, and loyalty. A key finding of a survey, commissioned for OGO, states, 40% of employed Americans would put more energy into their work if they receive recognition more often.

Employee recognition activities engage employees in the workplace and change their behavior towards work for the benefit of the business. If they are appreciated for their efforts, they will work even harder to get that recognition.

Even a simple “thank you” can create the emotional connection your employees need to have with your organization.

Also read: Top 7 Performance Appraisal Mistakes Managers Make

3. Focus On Brainstorming Sessions

Brainstorming is the most effective technique to generate new ideas.

Though these sessions are loud and chaotic, and sometimes it doesn’t give any productive results, it remains one of the best employee engagement activities.

When structured the right way, brainstorming sessions can:

  • Encourage out-of-the-box ideas, because it allows employees to think without the fear of judgement
  • Helps in team building, because it encourages open collaboration to generate innovative ideas
  • Produce a diverse range of ideas as it introduces different perspectives from different people
  • Help teams generate a large number of ideas in no time which can be used to find the ideal solution

4. Fun Sessions Help Increase Employee Engagement

Fun sessions are a massive hit when it comes to employee engagement at the workplace.

Working continuously can be exhausting for your employees. A fun session, once or twice a month, gives them a sweet break from their hectic work schedule. It helps them to start again with a fresh mind. Not only that, it also gives your employees the chance to interact with other team members.

From fun games to silly trophies to creative activities, everything is allowed in a fun session.

Also read: Employee Turnover: Know Why Employees Quit

5. Emphasize Work-Life Balance

Today’s work culture revolves around the concept of work-life balance to a great extent. However, achieving a perfect work-life balance is still a dream for most of the corporate employees around the world. When your employees’ work-life is out of balance for a long time, employee engagement plunges.

To be highly engaged in the workplace, this balance is necessary. As Blake McCammon, Founder and CEO of WorkBoxed, put it, “Work-life balance is one of the most important things employers can do to help employees not only stay healthy and fit, but keep them engaged day by day.”

Provide your employees with work from home scenarios where they can enjoy life to the fullest, but still get their work done. Most professionals benefit from a blend of office-based and remote work environments. Various studies have shown work from home Wednesdays make teams collectively more productive.

Flexible work hours are also necessary to maintain employees’ work-life balance. When employees are bound by time, they spend more time looking at the clock than being productive; it affects quality and quantity of work. Offering your employees flexible work hours keeps them satisfied, productive, and is good for their mental health.

After all, one will never feel completely satisfied by work until they are satisfied by life.

Employee engagement and productivity are closely related to each other. Engaged employees are the most productive employees, and they make it easy to do your job well. So, set some time aside, decide your budget and resources, and incorporate these five activities into your employee engagement routine; you will have a more productive and happier workforce at your company.

 

Want to know how Engagedly can help you create an engaged workplace? Then request for a live demo

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7 Mistakes That Affect Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a hard-won effort. It’s not easy to come by and needs to be sustained over a long time in order to be effective.

However, once employee engagement is gained, it can be destroyed just as easily, by certain mistakes, which are either done ignorantly or sometimes cruelly, without even thought for how they are perceived by employees. If you want to preserve employee engagement at your organization and maintain workplace harmony, these are the blunders you must avoid making.

Having no vision

The three things you can’t do without in an organization are vision, mission and values statements. When your organization or team doesn’t have a vision, everyone in your team has to wait around to know what they should do next. They do not know what is the end goal they are aiming for. This creates needless confusion and frustration. Remember, having a vision brings everyone together.

Playing the blame game

It is inevitable, that at times, things will go horrendously wrong. That’s just how things go. However, when a crisis occurs, if you choose to attack people and find out who is responsible, instead of fixing the crisis, you are creating a culture where people will refuse to speak up whenever they make a mistake, for fear of being pulled up.

Remember that you all are on the same team. And not all mistakes are intentional and malicious. It’s human to make mistakes after all. So when a crisis occurs, your focus should first circle around on fixing it. And then you can figure out what caused the issue and take the action you need.

Setting unrealistic goals and deadlines

Everybody likes a challenge. But nobody likes to have to climb Mt. Everest with just a pickaxe. This aphorism holds true for goals as well. Goals should challenge employees. But they shouldn’t make them throw down the towel right away because they seem so very impossible.

Before setting goals and deadlines, think of how much bandwidth your employees have to achieve these goals. Goals should challenge your employees, but they should consume their entire working hours.

Also Read: How To Write Good Employee Goals And Objectives?

Humiliating employees

Everybody likes a little bit of fun and humour at the workplace, but it is important to keep in mind what counts as acceptable humor. If your humor embarrasses employees, makes them feel awkward or puts them on the spot or even hurts their feelings, then it does not belong to the workplace. Humiliating a person in public is a horrible thing to do. There’s no gaffe that merits being humiliated in public. If you must take someone to task, do so in private, in the way that any adult with common sense would do.

No recognition for good work

Imagine that you were given a really challenging task and you took a lot of effort and risk to complete it on time. After you complete the work, your contributions are swept under the rug. This happens once or twice and you would probably let it go. But when it happens on a frequent basis, it’s going to rub a lot of employees in the wrong way. Praise and recognition are important aspects of employee engagement. A lack of it is going to affect morale and of course, drive employees away.

Playing favorites

A manager is not going to like everyone on their team, that is a fact. There are going to be some he prefers more than the others, for good reasons (as opposed to sleazy reasons). However, whatever your personal opinion about someone, it should not affect the way you work with them. At work, all of us are adults, and as adults, it behooves us to treat everyone equally. Do not play favorites and even if you have favorites, blatantly seeking out your favourites for plum opportunities is tasteless and makes you look like an immature manager.

Ineffectual performance reviews

Poor performance reviews or poor performance management practices can also impact employee engagement. A lack of feedback, lack of direction and insufficient reviews all serve to make employees feel like their work is not being evaluated accordingly. One way to improve performance management is to automate it. There are many tools out there that can manage performance reviews effectively (Engagedly, being one of them). Choose one of them and get to fixing your review process.

Want to improve employee engagement at your organization?

Request a demo from Engagedly to find out how we can help!

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5 Perks To Boost Employee Engagement and Morale

Employee morale and employee engagement go hand in hand.

If employee morale is high, then you can be confident about a high engagement rate. But consequently, when morale is low, engagement is impacted as well.

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How Employee Engagement Software Can Boost Employee Engagement

What is the impact of poor employee engagement?

What does an organization have to lose by having low levels of employee engagement? After all, it is not the sole reason why organizations continue to keep running. However, while it might not be the sole reason why organizations continue to run, it does play a big role in keeping organizations running smoothly.

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The Importance Of Employee Recognition Programs

While most CEOs and managers are busy trying to expand their businesses, a large fraction of employees in their organizations are disengaged and display low levels of productivity.

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What Drives Employee Engagement? [Infographic]

How can organizations figure out what drives employee engagement?

The first thing they need to do is accept that there is no one universal driver of employee engagement.  In fact, there are many different drivers of engagement. What drives engagement in one organization may not do anything in other.

But there are a few drivers of engagement that are common enough that they work for  most organizations. Organizations should figure out what drives employee engagement for them and nurture that. Only then is it possible for organizations to truly reap the benefits.

drivers of employee engagement

About Engagedly

Engagedly is a performance management software for organizations looking to provide their employees with the opportunity for frequent and real-time feedback and accurate performance reviews. The software is easy to use and powerful enough to work with businesses of all sizes. Engagedly’s features like 360 feedback reviews, OKRs, manager feedback, peer praise, learning, and rewards help engage the workforce and improve the overall productivity of an organization.

Want to know how to drive employee engagement and nurture it? Download the resource below to find out!

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5 Reasons Why You Need Engagedly For Employee Engagement!

Why is it important to focus on employee engagement in this competitive business age? We often come across interesting articles which convey that engaged employees can help you increase your organizational productivity.

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How Can Leadership Drive Employee Engagement?

We know that leaders play a crucial role in organizations. In an organization, there needs to be someone whom we can look up to and the leader fulfills that role. In addition to leading the organization, one of a leader’s default duties is promoting and improving engagement.  Because when it comes to employee engagement, there’s not a lot employees can do unless they have engaged leaders who can show them the way.

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Employee Engagement: What To Do When Your Engagement Initiative Fails?

Why do employee engagement initiatives fail in so many organizations? Some of these initiatives start out great and then fizzle out. Others might not even take off. Ouch.

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Is Employee Engagement Just For Leaders?

Strategic internal communication is very important for the success of any organization. Organizations with engaged employees have better results compared to others.

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Do You Listen To Your Employees?

Do you listen to your employees? This article is probably going to be more helpful for you if you take a good look at the question I’ve posed at the beginning and realize the answer is ‘no’.

The automatic response to this question is always going to be yes. But in actuality, we all need to take a good look at it and be honest. How many of us actually listen? You see if you actually asked your employees this question in a different situation, where the answer wasn’t supposed to be revealed to you, then you’d probably be flabbergasted by their answers.

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14 Mistakes That Can Destroy Employee Engagement In Your Organization

What is the responsibility of an ideal manager? To increase productivity in their organization by building trust and fostering a healthy relationship with their employees.

But many managers still seem to have no idea, how important it is to keep their employees happy and engaged. So we, at Engagedly have collated a list of possible mistakes a manager makes that can kill employee engagement.

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5 Questions To Avoid In An Employee Engagement Survey

Our previous article 8 Steps To Effective Employee Surveys focused on how employee surveys help your employees engage better and build new organizational strategies. But before you proceed, take heed of the questions you should not include in an employee engagement survey.

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The New Rules of Employee Reward Programs

In our previous articles 6 Creative Ideas For Employee Engagement and 5 Employee Engagement Activities On A Budget, we discussed how employee engagement can help your organization and a few creative ideas that can help you engage your employees. In this article, we show you how employee reward programs affect an organization when implemented on a long term basis.

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5 Idea Generation Techniques That Your Employees Can Use

In the lifecycle of an organization or a product, there are inevitable ups and downs. The key is to get past those downs, preferably through the application of innovative ideas. Normally, your first instinct might be to call in a consultant. But before you do give your employees a chance.

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How To Motivate Employees In The Workplace

Reading literature on how to motivate employees in the workplace tells you exactly how to do that. But what it does not tell you is why motivation is important.
Why is it so important that in workplace psychology, there is a huge body of work devoted to workplace motivation alone?

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6 Employee Motivation Ideas To Get Most Out Of Your Employees

In order for employees to be engaged, they need to be motivated first. But motivation is not something that employees alone need to do. Motivation also needs to come from external forces, such as bosses and managers too.

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