Diplohack

It’s no secret that any company’s success depends largely on how satisfied, dedicated and sincere its employees are. A company can ensure all of this, and more, by emphasizing employee retention strategies at their offices.

Nothing kills employee dedication like disengagement with the company and their peers. Simply put, if employees aren’t engaged, the business can and will not grow. A dedicated workforce is one of the most valuable primary assets that any business can possess. Thankfully, with effective employee management and encouragement tactics, any company can boost the dedication within their workforce.

Offer Constructive Feedback and Outward Praise

When people think of employee engagement, they usually imagine financial benefits and perks. What nobody realizes is that employee retention starts with communication, which is completely free. The first step to engaging employees is appreciating their efforts and acknowledging their roles in keeping your business running. One simple act of praise can go a long way towards ensuring your employees become a dedicated force to be reckoned with.

Here are some ways you can do that. You can appreciate employees in front of the entire team(s) for their performance. The management can reward them for their performance with prominent rewards. You can even hold monthly ‘appreciation parties’ to celebrate your teams’ accomplishments.

In addition, you should also balance the equation by having constructive feedback sessions.

By displaying this sort of rewarding leadership, and by pushing your employees in the right way, you can do wonders in terms of workforce retention.

Increase Employee Retention through Training

Ne great way to show that you care about your employees, and their career goals, is by training and developing them on the job.

Here is a win-win situation for everyone. You, as an employer, can slowly upskill your workforce, whereas your employees get to jump ahead in their careers while increasing their competency overall. Depending on your company requirements, and your employees’ personal goals, you can provide training in the following ways:

• Online learning management system, with the option to create your own training courses.
• Have workshops, host seminars, and implement on-site training sessions with employees.
• Buy training courses on platforms such as Coursera and edX.
• Provide them access to services such as Credit Karma, to teach them better financial and credit management, on the personal front.

Through proper implementation, a training program can potentially turn any team into a well-oiled machine.

Focus on Employee Retention from the Get-Go

Non-smart business owners and managers often emotionally detach themselves from new hires, just because they haven’t ‘earned’ their trust and communication. Each employer should realize that in order to build trust, they need to make the first move towards opening a line of communication.

By retaining your employees from day one, you’ll begin to earn their trust directly, establish a positive workplace culture, and decrease your employee turnover rate. Create a natural and comprehensive onboarding process. Provide new hires with all the required tools and resources. Lastly, create a buddy program to better lead the employees into their job positions. Creating a positive first impression is necessary, so ensure that your employee retention strategies cover new recruits.

Provide Competitive Benefits to Attract & Retain Top Talent

More than anything, offering attractive benefits, on top of competitive salaries, can do wonders towards employee retention. To motivate employees to go the extra mile, show them that you care about their wellbeing. Doing this will not only help retain current employees, but it will also ensure that you attract the most competent candidates.

Here are some of the best employee retention-related in business today:

• Tuition assistance/Student loan repayments
• Employee discounts
• Free gym memberships
• Employee assistance programs
• Profit-sharing

Work with your finance department to create perks that make you stand out in the overall job market.

Demonstrate Care for Employee Wellness

Nothing says that you care about your workforce quite the same as having an effective employee wellness program, seeing as a healthy workforce is a more productive one. However, most companies consider ‘employee wellness’ to be a combination of in-office yoga classes, gym memberships, and a handful of similar perks.

While the aforementioned perks are clearly important, and make up a usual employee wellness program, employers should also invest in the emotional wellbeing of their workforce via direct communication and engagement.

Ensure Employee Retention by Avoiding Micromanagement

It’s very important for employers to not micromanage employees, as it is one of the biggest killers of workplace morale and productivity.

There’s a thin line between offering constructive feedback and telling your employees how they should be doing their jobs.

Final Word

Remember that employee engagement isn’t a sprint. It is in fact, a long and consistent marathon. By being consistent in your employee retention efforts, your company will soon begin to reap the benefits. Disengaged employees can cost your company a lot of money, so you can make an employee engagement survey to make sure that doesn’t happen.

When devising and implementing your engagement strategy, following the latest employee engagement trends and finding the right balance between feasibility and satisfaction are both important. However, there’s another thing that’s crucial; the absence of which from your strategy might be costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. It is, recognizing disengaged employees.

What is a Disengaged Employee?

A disengaged employee is a worker who isn’t emotionally invested in their company, don’t see their jobs as ‘careers’, and are overall dissatisfied with their employers.

According to an eye-opening survey, US employers collectively lose anywhere from $450 to 500 billion each year to disengaged employees.

Taking appropriate measures to identify them, and then engage them, can go a long way in ensuring business success. It can also help you make quick changes to your existing employee engagement strategy.

If you don’t engage your employees, they’re likely to:

• Look for other employers, causing you to lose valuable talent and deal with high turnover rate.
• Compromise with their performance i.e. lower productivity, make more mistakes, etc.
• Don’t participate/show their interest in company initiatives.

The above points barely scratch the surface. As mentioned earlier, companies can lose billions of dollars every year due to disengaged employees alone.

Recognizing Disengaged Employees

The first step towards dealing with a disengaged workforce is to look for signs of disengagement.

It’s all about observing, and seeing how employees react to different things (or just how they behave in general), can help you identify the disengaged employees from the engaged ones.

Here are some tips:

Conduct Employee Engagement Surveys

Before observing and making assumptions, it’s best if you leveraged a good ol’ fashioned employee survey.

If you’ve never used them before, they’re a series of questions, asked either in the form of questionnaires or interviews. They go like:

• How employees ‘feel’ within the workplace
• How satisfied they are with the management
• To what extent are they satisfied with the perks and benefits that are being offered to them
• Whether the work is interfering with their personal lives

The list goes on.

While creating a survey, put yourself in the shoes of an average disengaged employee.

Think about the challenges they face on a daily basis and how often they think about giving up.

On top of that, think about all of the possible factors that could be behind their disengagement.

Asking your employees directly about their challenges and their opinions on how to improve things is a lot easier than observing and making assumptions.

Observe How They React to New Initiatives and Projects

A telltale sign of disengaged employees is a lack of interest in new projects or company-wide initiatives.

Disengaged employees are only concerned with clocking in, doing the bare minimum, and clocking out.

They’re not motivated to go the extra mile, let alone, take charge of new projects.

The next time your company takes on a new project, observe how different teams react to it.

Even if the general feeling towards the new project is positive, there might be a few employees who will be indifferent.

See which of your employees take the initiative when it comes to managing a new project or performing a fresh task, and which ones don’t.

If you feel an employee always shies away from new challenges, talk to them. The reason isn’t always disengagement. It might also be a lack of confidence.

See How Well Your Employees Get Along with Each Other

One of the most noticeable features of a fully engaged workforce is that they value teamwork.

Employee engagement naturally results in harmony among teammates.

Disengaged employees, on the other hand, aren’t known for getting along with others.

They may greet their colleagues with smiles, but when it comes to collaboration, they don’t play so well.

To get a picture, simply ask the supervisors about how well their subordinates work within teams.

You can also gauge this by promoting the idea of cross-functional teams within your organization.

Pair them up with someone unfamiliar, and observe how they behave when dealing with colleagues from other departments.

If they don’t live up to your expectations, talk to them to find out what’s stopping them from working as a team.

See How Often Employees Take Off

Workplace absenteeism, when reasonable, is a common thing.

Every now and then, people get sick, have errands to run, or personal matters to deal with.

You can’t expect your employees to show up every single day to work, throughout the year (in fact, if that’s the case, you should encourage them to take days off and relax). That’s why companies have PTOs.

However, if you see an employee taking days off every other week, it could mean either of the following:

• They’re dealing with something in their personal lives, such as sickness, a sick family member, or any other challenge.
• They’re disengaged.

Either way, it falls on you, as an employer, to talk to your employees and show your support.

Ending Note

By following the above tips, you might start noticing signs of disengagement in your workforce, which could cause problems for your employee retention.

From there, it’s up to you to take the necessary measures to engage your disengaged employees.

As per a recent survey, the technology sector in the US is among the top 10 most stressful industries to work in. That’s one of the reasons why this sector has some of the most disengaged employees. To tackle this problem, the leading high tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM, to name a few, have adapted a rather interesting approach when it comes to engaging their employees. From time to time, these companies shape the employee engagement trends for the rest of us to follow.

Most, if not all, high tech workplaces depend on innovation when it comes to their survival. That’s because, without innovating, they’re prone to losing significant chunks of their market-share. As coming up with new ideas and setting examples are two core values of any high tech company, unique ideas for employee engagement come naturally to them.

That being said, there are a few employee engagement trends that are shaping human capital management in the US i.e. how they view perks, the type of environment they wish to create for creativity to flourish, and an increased focus on flexibility and training.

Continue reading to learn about the 4 hottest employee engagement trends to adapt.

1.     Equal Emphasis on Non-Monetary Perks

Offering adequate employee benefits, based on the preferences of your employees, is one of the first and foremost steps to take when it comes to engaging your workforce.

However, when people think of benefits, they tend to imagine monetary perks, such as health insurance, allowances, bonuses, etc.

What they tend to forget are the good ol’ fashioned, non-monetary perks.

In the high tech industry, non-monetary perks are now being considered just as important as their monetary counterparts.

Here are some ideas:

• Flexible schedules
• Career development opportunities
• Healthcare/Fitness programs
• Tangible recognitions
• Concierge services

Remember, intrinsic rewards are far better than extrinsic ones when it comes to engaging your employees, so, don’t shy away from throwing in an additional non-monetary perk or two into your plan.

2.     Embracing Agile Work Environments

The days of cubicles, designated desks, and team silos are drawing their last breaths. At least, such is the case with technology companies.

As preferences continue to change, modern teams, especially those that need to channel their creativity and technical prowess to get the job done, don’t like to be provided with fixed working locations.

Because of that very reason, high tech companies have embraced the idea of agile workplaces.

What is an agile workplace? It is an open-layout design that promotes the idea of collaboration and freedom.

The idea behind an agile workplace isn’t limited to the physical working space/layout. The way people approach their work and communicate with each other, matter as well.

Here are some characteristics of a truly agile workplace:

• There are no designated desks (except for employees who need fixed workstations/equipment to get their jobs done)
• Employees are free to move around and interact with each other, which is great for engagement
• The supervisors mingle with their subordinates and don’t have separate ‘offices’
• Most of the meetings are conducted in a casual setting, and not in a tradition.

If you’ve been following a traditional setting for some time now, it’s best that you ask your employees what they prefer, before making any widespread changes that affect their jobs.

3.     Increased Focus on Training

Innovations and changing consumer preferences mean only one thing – tech companies need to keep the skillsets of their workforces up-to-speed if they want to keep up with the market.

For that reason, high tech companies have always put emphasis on training and learning. In fact, for this industry, it’s one of the timeless employee engagement trends.

Leading high tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, no longer require college degrees for many entry-level and mid-level positions. All they require are skills (preferably backed by certifications).

This goes to show that these companies no longer care about IQ and academic prowess. All they care about are skills, and the ability to learn new things.

With competition getting even tougher, it’s now more important than ever to provide formal training to your workforce.

4.     Embracing Work/Life Blend

Last, but not least, some high tech companies are now embracing the idea of work/life blend, rather than simply providing work/life balance to the employees.

The concept behind work/life blend is to offer the maximum level of flexibility to employees when it comes to choosing their schedules and working spaces.

That way, work doesn’t feel like ‘work’, it becomes a part of life, and therefore, feels less stressful and more fun.

Ending Note

If you’re an employer in the tech industry, embracing the above-mentioned employee engagement trends is crucial if you want to increase your employee retention and stay ahead of the competition.