Owing to the onset of the pandemic during the last few years, the prospect of recession has been looming larger than ever. While the memory of the economic crisis of pre-2010 – The Great Recession still remains fresh, economists and CEOs all across the globe braced for its second coming since the global pandemic. Now dubbed the Great Resignation, the year 2021 saw more American voluntarily bid adieu to their jobs than at any other time on record.
It is more than mandatory for you to take significant steps to make your employees love their job and enjoy coming to work. To combat employee turnover, you got to focus on not only enhancing employee satisfaction but engagement as well. As any leader or manager of an organization knows, turnover is deteriorating for all sorts of businesses. Organizations that do not consider the effect a lost employee can have on their team are doomed to experience the same cycle again. A high rate of turnover will establish a culture of fear, affect the work of the teams, and hinder the functioning plus growth of the organization.
HR teams of all organizations have been working immensely hard to get new employees on board and hold onto the existing ones. Turns out, one of the most significant keys to battling turnover is employee engagement. While it’s completely valid that compensation is an important aspect driving voluntary turnover, career development concerns prominently fall into the equation too. Many employees are leaving their roles due to an abundance of opportunities for advancement, which has actually been a reason for turnover, even before the pandemic. But at the end of the day, one cannot fix a leaky bucket – implying that when there are systematic concerns with employee retention, getting more employees onboard won’t fix the issue. Without fixing the drivers of attrition at your organization – low employee engagement, lack of growth opportunities, or even poor work-life balance, you remain at the risk of losing your existing workforce even if you are getting new employees on board. And with time, you might end up losing the new ones too.
Employee engagement for battling turnover
Organizations with highly engaged employees tend to produce better business results and have lower turnover. However, boosting employee engagement isn’t a quick fix. Even though each organization and its workforce are different from one another, there are a few key facets that organizations can pay attention to for bolstering their engagement levels.
1. Prioritize surveys, culture, and work-life balance
In addition to providing support to your employees during the time of their major live events, crisis, and pivotal milestone, there are a couple of components that support employee engagement. The main four components of employee engagement are pulse surveys, employee wellness, engagement surveys, and culture initiatives. Particularly, it is the organizations that conduct engagement surveys that are more likely to have a highly engaged workforce. The engagement surveys enable the voices of your employees to be heard and acted upon as well. Developing an understanding of how your employees are experiencing the organizational culture is crucial to ensuring that the promised mission, vision, values, and culture are not compromised. Through such surveys, your organization can have direct feedback from your employees about how they are being served by the organization. Talking about surveys, it is always more is more. This implies that organizations should conduct such surveys as regularly as possible.
2. Provide appropriate support to employees at all times
One of the most vital features of employee engagement is the moments that matter and how your organization supports your workforce during those times. It refers to the moments that have the most significant impact on an employee’s organizational experience during their day, year, and career. For instance, the pandemic happened to be just one of those moments. It is quite natural for the employees to remember their experiences, for better or worse during the most crucial moments in their lives. It is such moments during which it is extremely crucial to work on your employee engagement. Stories after stories have come out about how employees are leaving their jobs during pandemics due to a lack of communication from their leaders. If these employees were given the flexibility and resources they required to work amid the crisis, perhaps they would have continued to be working at their organization instead of leaving it. This makes it clear that employees have to be supported by the leaders and the organization during such moments.
No wonder the demand for employee engagement tools is on a consistent rise now. No matter what size or industry your organization might be in, focusing on employee engagement is what will particularly enable your organization to combat turnover, disengagement, and unproductive employees. For more proficient guidance regarding employee engagement contact us!
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