Are You Facing Low Employee Engagement? Here’s What You Can Do

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Do you know that organizations with engaged employees perform a whopping 202% better than those that overlook employee engagement? This is the reason why effective people management has become one of the utmost prominent primacies for organizations nowadays.

JOP employee engagement

Virtual meetings that started as a temporary fix are now turning into the ‘only option’ for many companies across the globe. Eye contact during conference hall meetings or chit-chats promotes trust but, in the era of Zoom, it’s nearly impossible to make the gaze meet. In the increasingly virtual world, leaders miss out on some signs of decreasing employee engagement that was easy to catch while working under the same roof. This wore off the social interaction between the managers and the employees and is resulting inconspicuously reduced informal interactions between colleagues as well. Not only this, leaders are unable to read the body language and intercept the nonverbal cues of employees on the virtual landscape. All these contribute to decreased employee engagement and result in underachieved organizational goals. 

A study was conducted by Gallup on People management and the results were awakening. The study found that nearly 85% of employees worldwide show signs of being actively disengaged at the workplace. On the contrary, employee engagement software and employee engagement tools must get the top precedence in the workplace strategy. But why do employees feel disengaged is a question that underlies. Here are all possible challenges that companies are facing with employee engagement. 

  • Lack of Commitment from the Top Management:

The top management is busy keeping other things in place and this results in a lack of commitment and insight. If experts are to be believed then lack of insight is seen as the biggest reason for lower employee engagement in any organization. Usually, top management unknowingly overlooks their involvement in lean implementation and spends less time in the workplace to supervise the process. Top management is typically busy with other business engagements. Thus, it becomes difficult for them to keep people management as a priority over other issues. Lack of communication also goes in the lack of commitment from the top management. This results in an increased level of employee disengagement. 

  • Lack of Clarity of Goals: 

It takes a lot to keep the business afloat, and employee engagement can bring a world of business. However, it is often seen that a lack of clarity of goals and OKRs among the staff and level-wise management creates a barrier. Clarity of goals contributes to employee satisfaction and is directly linked to high productivity and loyalty to the organization. Thus, clarity matters. What matters more is knowing what goals are assigned to whom. Keeping things foggy or ambiguous will eventually result in underachieved organizational goals. Lack of clarity of goals induces employee disengagement, and this impact is as expensive as it gets. A study reveals that employee disengagement costs around $370 billion a year.

  • Lack of Recognition:

Employee engagement and recognition are directly proportional to each other. Employees feel happy and more engaged when their work is recognized. Many organizations do not pay heed to the concept of employee recognition and appreciation, but this contributes a lot to boosting employee engagement. Appreciation is a human gesture that works as the most straightforward employee engagement tool and motivates them to perform better. It makes them feel valued, empowered, and accountable for their work and ends up generating an intense emotional commitment to the organization.

Research by Deloitte reveals that organizations with recognition programs are highly effective at enhancing and improving overall employee engagement. Not only this, such organizations have 31% lower voluntary turnover in comparison to the organizations without any recognition or appreciation program. 

  • Lack of Work-Life Balance: 

Work-life balance is another aspect of a healthy work environment that most leaders overlook. Organizations expect employees to place their work above everything else, resulting in increased stress, whereas a healthy work-life balance prevents burnout in the workplace. A healthy work environment backed with work-life balance is imperative to motivate employees to work with maximum productivity. When employees work in a healthy work environment, they feel more engaged and satisfied with their work.

Now, as you know all the factors contributing to the low employee engagement in your organization, it’s essential to understand that employee engagement is not a standalone concept. Instead, it’s a constant process that encompasses various elements of workplace culture. Performance management, people management, workplace commitment, job satisfaction, and well-defined OKRs, to name a few, are among all those elements. There goes a lot in keeping any business afloat, and as said before, well-practiced employee engagement can bring a world of difference. Thus it is essential to understand what will be the negative impact of low employee engagement.

How Can Low Employee Engagement Affect Your Organization?

  • Disengaged employees turn the healthy discussion into complaining sessions: 

In a room full of workforce facing low employee engagement, there can be no such thing as ‘healthy discussion.’ No matter what, all your conversations, meeting sessions will turn into complaining sessions if your employees are not motivated and engaged. 

  • Low employee engagement creates conflicts among team members: 

When employees are disengaged at the workplace, changes of conflicts among team members increases. This also gives birth to Substantive conflicts that arise over things such as goals, tasks, and the allocation of resources. Disengaged employees are most likely to live in the bubble of the ‘us versus them mentality. Such a mentality can become a shared narrative and can spread like wildfire among workgroups.

Low Employee Engagement can have a detrimental effect on my organization. What’s the Safe Escape, then? 

Long story short, a well-defined Employee Engagement Platform that fosters the growth of the overall organization. A platform that ensures employee OKR management simultaneously. 

Employee Engagement tools are gaining staunch proponents across industry segments. Of late, a performance management system is seen as an effective employee engagement tool that boosts employee retention, improves the way people are being recruited, and helps organizations to achieve their OKRs. In the past few years, organizations witnessed the deep impact of employee engagement on overall business growth. However, companies are still stuck in a struggling phase to create an employee engagement system that keeps the employees happy at work despite all this. As suggested by the University of Warwick, employees who are happy are 12% more productive, whereas unhappy employees show 10% ‘less’ productivity.

This raises the need to create a holistic work environment that promotes role clarity and employee recognition and fosters mental health to keep OKRs aligned. The joy of Performing does exactly this for your organization- spreading joy at work (as the name suggests). JOP is an easy-to-use, high utility collaboration tool that helps in boosting employee engagement and employee retention by keeping everyone in the organization on the same page. 

Employee engagement sounds like a secret recipe for the success of any business, and organizations need a promising system that can turn things around when it comes to employee engagement so that organizations can:

  • Bring the real joy of working together: 

For any employee, what matters the most is job satisfaction and the happiness they derive from daily tasks assigned at the workplace. JOP understands that having happy employees will make a difference. Happier and friendlier employees are more productive and admirable to their coworkers. 

  • Remove the disconnect between Individual and Organizational goals: 

In the end, every key strategic tactic comes down to whether the organization is able to realize the annual or quarterly goals or not? If not, then maybe the organization is facing a stark disconnect between individual and organizational goals. JOP has been engineered to deliver measurable outcomes that are not only business-oriented but promote employees’ wellness at the same time. According to research by Imperative purpose-oriented employees whose goals are aligned with organizational goals are 54% more likely to stay in the company for more than five years and are most likely considered as high performers.

  • Channels 360-degree feedback:

Over the years, 360-degree feedback has emerged as a key point to focus on. Instead of relying on an annual system, organizations need to monitor and supervise performance reviews on a weekly and quarterly basis. JOP helps ease the process for your organization to shape the workplace better and give them a metaphoric pat on the back in the shape of regular feedback.

  • Leans the information and increases productivity:

The abundance of organization-related information and documentation challenges the productivity of employees and lowers employee engagement. This is why JOP helps your employees locate only relevant information that they should know. Not only this, but JOP also improves communication and collaboration that helps an organization become more agile as employees will get access to required information faster. This way, everyone works better towards achieving common goals while keeping engaged.

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Gaurav Sabharwal

CEO of JOP

Gaurav is the CEO of JOP (Joy of Performing), an OKR and high-performance enabling platform. With almost two decades of experience in building businesses, he knows what it takes to enable high performance within a team and engage them in the business. He supports organizations globally by becoming their growth partner and helping them build high-performing teams by tackling issues like lack of focus, unclear goals, unaligned teams, lack of funding, no continuous improvement framework, etc. He is a Certified OKR Coach and loves to share helpful resources and address common organizational challenges to help drive team performance. Read More

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