The changing work environment of 2020 and 2021 has left business leaders wondering what to prioritize as they continuously navigate through uncertain business conditions due to the pandemic and adapt to evolving employee requirements. With the difficulty of safeguarding employee experience and retaining their top talents, leaders have been promptly focusing on employee engagement trends to actively engage with their talents.
Understanding the trends and how they can best serve your workforce in these highly competitive times, here are the top employee engagement trends for the year 2022 that organizations should adopt fast to embrace the future.
Start with People-First Culture
The competition to acquire talents and the rise in employee expectations have flipped the people-first culture from desirable to a workplace essential. Though many organizations tried to join the dots and improve employee experience, a few were only able to crack the code and realize the importance of employee engagement. With the risk to lose top talents, this is an urgent need of implementation to successfully elevate company culture. Top organizations like Tata Group, Accenture, Godrej, ITC, and including us at ODM Group are implementing strategies to reinvent the decades-old company culture. We believe the following culture can bloom with care and respect for every individual included in your workforce, starting from the very bottom of the chain to the top levels.
Introduce Perfect Work-Life Harmony
Embracing work flexibility is becoming a primary employee engagement highlight for 2022. With the continuing pandemic, organizations understand that plenty of their job functions don’t require employees to join the office physically. Huge implementation of constructive work policies such as flexible office timings, remote work, and work from home in recent years proves the validity of the point. This is a cost-effective yet highly successful employee engagement trend.
According to multiple surveys, more than 75% of employees experience greater productivity while continuing with work from home, 71% of employees positively indicate that they are experiencing less stress from commuting, 74% of workers encounter less distraction, and 65% of workers are now experiencing fewer office politics. The recent Deloitte Global 2021 Millennial and Gen Z Survey reveals that more than 60% of full-time employees are willing to switch to the freelance and gig economy within the next couple of years. That’s why; it’s advisable for organizations to start early and introduce constructive employee engagement policies to successfully retain their talents and improve productivity.
Focus on Mental Wellbeing & Flexibility
Research shows that events such as the global pandemic magnify employee self-reflection factors, resulting in a quick change of perceptions that may look different to them before. While salary matters, top performers often find the workplace interesting that prioritize employee wellbeing, health, and flexibility. Organizations should prioritize these benefits and add them as a new wing to positively impact the employee experience.
For example, we introduced our initiative Learning & Development Department last year to all our employees, which is working towards the mental wellbeing and skill development of our employees while bridging the gap between employee desirable experience and action required from management.
Employees as Brand Ambassadors
Though technology plays a big role in corporate branding, your workforce also massively influences your corporate branding approach. Research has proven that your organization message shared by an employee gets 5X more engagement than when the organization shares the same. By educating your employees about the company values, they can be transformed into the most valuable group of brand ambassadors. Your organization should be a fun and great place to work, or else the attrition rates will go eventually high. Map out your goals and communicate them with your employees positively without rush, and your employee branding campaign will be a guaranteed success.
With our recent launch of ODM Global School, we have implemented the employee branding campaign, and it worked superb for us, wide-spreading our organizational value, trust, reputation, and message to new heights. We are fortunate enough to have such cooperative internal stakeholders who promptly share our views and values, and we are working tirelessly to make their employee experience at ODM an unforgettable one.
As they say, if you do not look after your employees, someone else will. Doing nothing for employee engagement is no more an option with professional and social platforms constantly promoting the virtues of new-age company culture. Before you start working on your employee engagement, we would suggest that you do not take this chapter just as a trend; go with it as a new way of working, and the results will be extraordinary.
