Top Employee Engagement Tips

Employees spend more time at work than they do with family and loved ones. It’s important for leaders to understand this and promote a positive work culture that supports its people. Leaders need to foster a culture of well-being and invest in initiatives that support the needs of employees.

The key to successful well-being initiatives – or any other people-focused initiative – is strong leaders who walk the talk, listen to employees and take action. A huge part of culture comes from the top-down, so it is critical that leaders demonstrate the beliefs of their organisation and reinforce the behaviours that reflect organisational values. This sets the scene and standards of behaviours of employees.

Understanding the psychological contract

Engagement can have a huge impact on an organisation’s retention. Employees are attracted to pay and benefits, but they will stick around for meaningful work. If we can provide work that is fulfilling, challenging, that celebrates wins and provides pathways for growth, an employee will have a greater awareness of their purpose and be less likely to look elsewhere.

For me, one of the most significant factors that leaders and human resource managers need to consider is the psychological or the social contract between an employer and employee. This is a set of mutual expectations and obligations quite separate to the employment contract. It’s introduced through HRM practices and is developed over time through daily interactions between employees, managers and the organisation.

The challenge is that the psychological contract is subjective and can mean different things to different groups of people (different generations, for example). Younger generations might expect more learning and development opportunities as part of the psychological contract whereas older generations might expect more flexibility at work. The beauty of the psychological contract, unlike the employment contract, is that it can be tailored to different employee groups through effective HRM practices.

Inviting employee feedback

 Engagement surveys and more frequent pulse surveys are a great way to encourage active employee feedback. I would also recommend a series of commencement interviews in the first six months of a new hire, as well as stay interviews within the broader employee group. For me, there is less value in the traditional exit survey as the ship has sailed by this point and there is less of an opportunity to act on feedback, particularly for those leaving the organisation.

While employee feedback is key, the most critical part of this process is for employers to feed this information back to the business and then act on what is being asked of them. When employees can see action as a result of their feedback, they are more likely to show higher levels of engagement. ELMO Survey has been incredibly beneficial for us in not only collecting feedback, but also ensuring that our employees are being heard.

What we’re doing at ELMO

Our solutions help promote employee engagement as early on as the hiring process. ELMO Recruitment Software makes it easy for candidates to view and apply for open positions through a centralised job board. It acts as a communication channel through which candidates and employees can coordinate interviews and send and receive messages.

Once a candidate accepts an offer of employment, a series of processes are triggered in our Onboarding solution, streamlining payroll with IT services. Welcoming talent into an organisation with a smooth and simple hiring experience will help promote engagement from the get-go. I believe that any Onboarding solution should always be evolving. We have had some positive feedback on our onboarding experience from many of our new employees at ELMO and we’re always looking for ways to make it even more exciting.

Both ELMO Recruitment and ELMO Onboarding have been a great way for us to communicate our employee value proposition (EVP), which has helped us to attract and retain top talent.

Our Learning Management solution can also be used to engage employees and empower self-learning throughout their career. We’re able to create learning pathways and development plans for our people who are looking to be promoted or to move into other parts of the business.

Our Performance Management Software (LMS) solution promotes engagement by increasing continuous two-way dialogue between employees and managers and provides an opportunity to establish performance goals and targets that is consultative. We use our Performance Management solution to work with our employees to create development plans to enhance their careers. We can also link these plans with our Learning solution with content from ELMO’s Course Library.

Keen to learn more about how ELMO can drive engagement in your team? Use our interactive solution configurator to help you find the right solutions for your needs. ELMO offers an integrated end-to-end platform that covers all aspects of an employee’s lifecycle with a company – from ‘hire to retire’. Don’t hesitate to contact us for further information.

This article was written by Jamie Hermes, HR Business Partner at ELMO Cloud HR & Payroll.