Employee Experience & Engagement
What are the ‘key moments’ or experiences that matter most to your employees and make them smile?
Understand what motivates and engages your people, and deliver those things to them, day in day out, fairly and inclusively.
Question.
Why is getting employee engagement right more critical than ever before?
Answer.
During this decade more of the world’s talent will choose to work freelance to match the ‘worklife blend’ scenario that they want to achieve. By 2028 the majority of the US workforce and half of the UK workforce will be freelance. This poses important questions for organisations, including what their workforce model should look like, and how they engage their workforce to deliver the best possible results whether they are permanent or contingent employees.
Is your business ready for this trend?
Have you thought about the mix of talent you need and where it will come from?
Are you in a strong position to engage this talent – regardless of the type of employment contract involved?
Our vast experience of every type of organisation means we can help you identify or fine tune the moments that matter most to your people in your different employee segments.
Make your employees happy and they will reward you by going ‘above and beyond’.
Or keep reading for details of our Employee Experience Measurement and Solutions and our Employee Engagement FAQ. We want to give you all the information you need.
What are the ‘key moments’ or employee experiences that matter most to your employees?
There are many examples of these employee experiences, here are just a few:
We support organisations to identify and embed the solutions (behaviours and processes) that will deliver the most important ‘moments’ (in the best possible way for their employees in their context) in five areas:
- On-boarding
- Values and culture
- Diversity and inclusion
- Career development
- Coaching and mentoring
We also support organisations in the measurement of their employee experience and engagement both before and after any intervention.
Speaking regularly with and getting honest, quality feedback from employees is essential, to understand what is important to them and how the organisation is delivering on what’s important to them.
At talentsmoothie we have vast experience of gathering data from surveys, focus groups, workshops, and interviews. Our approach to measuring engagement isn’t just a ‘plug and play’ survey. We adapt the research tools to ensure possible ‘solutions’ are gathered as well as gaining a temperature check on how well the organisation is doing. The metholodolgy used is designed around your current EVP and values. The results are clear and recommendations action orientated.
Our measurement informs our solutions, so we help you get it right for your people in your context.
On-boarding
Let’s start as we mean to go on! Connecting organisations and people couldn’t be more important than at the very start of their journey together. That’s why we work with organisations to ensure that as well as covering the basics, employees align with the culture and ways of doing things, know who their key stakeholders are and where to find them, understand the strategy and company purpose so that they can start to fully contribute as quickly as possible. We can advise and support you to develop a plan that supports new joiners during their first year with you.
Values and Culture
Values support the vision, shape the culture and reflect what is important to an organisation. They are principles and beliefs that impact our behaviours and ‘how we do business’. Successful organisations have clearly defined goals and values that are well communicated, understood and demonstrated by employees throughout the organisation. Using values to attract and retain talent is no longer seen as a ‘nice to have’ but as a ‘must have’. A career today means much more than a stable place to work, the millennial generation are looking at company values, meaning, community and culture. We work with organisations to identify their values, articulate what they mean in practice day-to-day for all employees (whatever their roles and responsibilities) and build the processes to support and reward the right behaviours. Companies work with us to clarify and articulate their values for the first time, define new values more relevant to their current business, or refine and/or integrate values after a merger or acquisition.
Career Development
Employees are more likely to be engaged and motivated when they know new and interesting career opportunities are available to them; lifelong learning opportunities are crucial for organisation success. We help you put career development high on your agenda, to benefit satisfaction scores, improve performance, and retain and attract great people. Our workshops and coaching help individuals to get clearer on who they really are, know what they want from their career and create a plan to get where they want to be. Our practical ‘development centres’ help individuals achieve their goals more quickly, and also provide line and HR managers with new insights to manage the talent pipeline. Our ‘train the trainer’ programmes for managers help build internal capability in career development skills including career planning, feedback, coaching and mentoring. Many clients report that individuals involved in supporting others’ careers often also see an increase in their personal motivation by getting satisfaction from seeing others progress and succeed.
Diversity and Inclusion
With diversity comes richer thinking, innovation and higher performance; there are countless arguments for why ensuring a diverse, inclusive culture is a good thing for your business. Increasingly businesses are looking to procure services from other businesses that have a clear and demonstrable diversity and inclusion strategy too. We help you to create the case for change, articulate a strategy that’s right for your business and what’s more difficult, to see it through with the required behavioural change. This can start with influencing Senior Leaders or by creating a small groundswell of change agents who lead by example. Our specific workshops include Unconscious Bias and Generational Diversity, which are adapted for your particular areas of opportunity.
Coaching and Mentoring
Our team of excellent coaches support our clients directly with individual and team coaching, as well as helping to develop internal coaching and mentoring capability to achieve longer-term benefits. Individuals benefit by being more productive, more engaged, and trusted to use their strengths and capabilities; they are more likely to want to stay with the company. Organisations experience increased efficiency and satisfaction, with individuals taking more ownership, accelerating their development and relying less on their already busy leaders for regular input and direction.
Employee Engagement FAQ
What is Employee Engagement?
Employee Engagement is partly about process; it applies a structured approach to understanding, stimulating and measuring the level of employee attachment to an organisation and its objectives. Perhaps more importantly, it’s also an outcome; it’s an environment in which employees feel positive about their work, align themselves with their organisation’s purpose, ‘go the extra mile’ and become advocates for their company.
Employee Engagement is an umbrella term covering almost anything that affects how people feel towards their organisation. There are robust and well-tested models on the market that attempt to define Employee Engagement, but many organisations choose to add elements that have particular relevance for them. This is really important, because Employee Engagement needs to be defined and understood in the context within which it is being used.
Why is Employee Engagement important?
Employee Engagement is relevant and important for people management and business performance because it’s about establishing good relationships between individuals and the organisations they work for and with. The quality of these relationships is often measured by factors including:
- Commitment
- Productivity
- Job satisfaction
- Involvement
- Happiness and wellbeing
Taken together, research studies make a convincing case that Employee Engagement explains higher levels of individual and organisational performance. While it is difficult to show a cause-and-effect relationship, there seems to be a positive correlation; if Employee Engagement increases, it’s probable that organisational performance will increase too. It is widely accepted that great Employee Engagement can improve:
- Employee retention
- Discretionary effort
- Quality of work
- Efficiency
- Customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Profitability
- Shareholder return
- Business growth
The reverse is also true. Not investing in activities connected with increased Employee Engagement is likely to have a detrimental effect on performance and organisational health.
Do you have any free Employee Engagement resources?
You can download our free Employee Engagement PDF Factsheet on our Insights page. It includes guidance about how to develop an Employee Engagement strategy, and how to embed the strategy. There, you can also find our Coaching, Mitigating Unconscious Bias and Improving Resilience Action Sheets, which are also free to download.
Can you give Employee Engagement project examples?
Our client case studies include a variety of Employee Engagement projects, indeed all our case studies touch on the topic in different ways. Our Pulsant case study focuses on Values, our Atkins Global case study on Unconscious Bias, our HSBC case study on Career Management and our GlaxoSmithKline case study on Culture and Values. You can find all the talentsmoothie case studies below.
Whatever stage you’re at with your Employee Experience & Engagement, we’d love to help.