Adapting your employee engagement strategy to the next normal

The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that your engagement strategy must evolve, as for your organisation to thrive in the next normal, a people-centric focus is vital.

This becomes especially apparent when you consider that employee engagement ensures that your people perform their best, which is undoubtedly a necessity during these turbulent times.

To support, our blog will delve into changes you can make and factors to consider when looking to optimise your initiative.

Topics you should be looking to analyse

To achieve a comprehensive insight into your employee engagement, you must analyse key areas of the business and your employees’ day-to-day.

Be sure to assess how people feel about the following topics:

• Innovation within the workplace
• To what extent leaders and managers listen
• Collaboration between teams
• Health and safety within the workplace
• Mental and physical wellbeing
• Transformation initiatives
• Inclusion strategies
• Trust among leaders and peers alike
• Available empowerment

How often do you measure employee engagement?

We recently ran a poll on one of our Virtual HR Event sessions which revealed that 55% of HR professionals only measure employee opinion annually.

While a yearly engagement survey requires a significant amount of resources, HR professionals also need to start looking to implement additional smaller and more regular gauges.

Consider creating a simple weekly survey that asks people:

• How their week went?
• What caused it to go that way?
• What can be improved?

These weekly surveys enable you to get fast and useful feedback, while your annual survey acts as an opportunity to get a detailed analysis.

Think, feel and act questions

Ensuring you get the questions right on your employee engagement survey is critical.

Whether you’re looking to improve your yearly survey, or you want to make your weekly survey more in-depth, utilise a think, feel and act approach that asks the following questions:

• How do you feel about your employer?
• Is the organisation a good place to work?
• Would you recommend your employer?
• How do you feel about working here?
• Do you work to your full potential?
• Will you go the extra mile for your organisation?
• Does working here make you want to do the best work you can?

Remember that data is merely the start

“An engagement survey provides fantastic information, but it’s only the starting point.” – Kate Pritchard, Head of Engagement and Leadership, Questback

Use the data you’ve acquired as the beginning of your employee engagement initiative and for the framework for your follow-up strategies.

The insights put you in a much better place to be successful and address the root causes of any challenges far more efficiently.

However, remember that your actions play a huge part in maintaining engagement as employees expect to see results since you’ve approached them for recommendations.

How can IRIS Cascade help?

For more support with employee engagement, take a look at IRIS Cascade, our fully customisable HR management system that provides a configurable approach to meet your specific needs.

Additionally, we also have our engagement module, IRIS Engage, that provides a technology platform to enable simple and streamlined communications across your entire organisation.