Employee engagement: a 365 commitment
Welcome to the third instalment in our employee engagement blog series
Engaging your workforce is not something you tick off the list once a year, nor is it something to pick up when the culture, productivity or morale seems a bit low. It’s a long-term, ongoing commitment.
At Something Big we’re BIG into planning so it’s no surprise our recommendation is to create an annual plan that works for your business.
There are some staple topics that all organisations should definitely be including in their employee engagement. We recommend the following:
Diversity and inclusion
There is a lot of work to do in every organisation to improve diversity and inclusion. What activity you include will depend on where your organisation is on the journey but there are many opportunities throughout the year to celebrate minority groups and promote inclusion.
Health and wellbeing
Both the physical and mental wellbeing of your workforce are vital to the productivity and general engagement in your organisation’s success. How you approach wellbeing will depend on the nature of your business and the roles your employees undertake – it may be appropriate for health and safety to take the lead, or you may find that, following a shift to remote working, mental health is a priority. Either way there are plenty of opportunities to include this in your annual plan.
Employee voice
An essential way to engage employees is ensuring they are listened to. Whilst this can be embedded into everyday management, it’s also important to plan in key opportunities to carry out surveys, listening groups and forums to ensure your workforce has a voice.
Active leadership
From announcing the annual financial results to laying out the vision and strategy for the year ahead, there should always be an allowance for leadership teams to formally present their plans to the workforce. This may be anything from a series of roadshows to a simple blog, podcast recording or an email, but our recommendation would be to keep leadership visible and transparent with their plans where possible.
Appreciation
Everyone likes to feel valued. Appreciating employees needs to be not only structured into reward and recognition processes but also into the overall employee engagement plans. This could be a special thank you after a peak period in the business or after the announcement of results, either way it’s important to make sure employees are feeling that their contribution has made a difference.
To help get your employee engagement plan started, we’ve collated a series of annual celebrations and awareness days in one downloadable employee engagement calendar.
In our next blog we will be focusing specifically on the growing mental health crisis and how employers can support employees on this topic. Get in touch to make sure you don’t miss the rest of this series.