Employee Engagement in the Job Market (part 1) – what is this ?
What engages employees?
A recent study enabled thousands of people to offer their opinions and the results were enlightening (click here to view the results).
No matter how outlandish or bizarre employers, business owners and management may think these are, simply ignoring popular opinion despite what you might believe about the a state of your economic situation, would be fool hardy!
The pay rise you can’t afford, for the second or third year in a row, may be mitigated by engaging employees in other ways, benefiting and improving their performance and consequently your business.
European companies face a communication and engagement challenge with continued limited pay budgets potentially failing to meet employee expectations, according to consultants Watson Wyatt.
A recent Watson Wyatt survey, which involved more than 700 organisations across Europe plus some from Africa and the Middle East, found that 58 per cent of businesses have undergone significant structural changes and six in 10 companies have implemented salary freezes in the past six months.
However, only 30 per cent have followed this through with changes to their reward strategy and only 27 per cent have communicated more about their pay strategy.
At Harcourt Matthews we are aware of sixteen South eastern England medium & large FTSE / independents undertaking major business transformation and re-organisation projects in Q1 2010. However, with many organisations failing to communicate pay strategies and define new roles and responsibilities, with these structural changes in mind, it is not surprising that large numbers of employees are feeling disengaged with their organisations, leaving talented individuals ready to accept new opportunities as the job market recovers….watch this space!
“It is clear that actions have been taken very quickly around salary freezes to manage cost, but this needs to be followed up with effective communications,’ said Carole Hathaway, European Head of Strategic Reward at Watson Wyatt.
‘Salary freezes cannot be maintained over multiple years without denting engagement and leaving employees more open to opportunities elsewhere.
‘To ensure employees feel valued and recognised, companies need to increase differentiation around reward, clarify their performance management approach and exploit engagement alternatives such as recognition plans,’ she added.
Are you …
- Discussing and debating the future of engagement
- Overcoming the barriers of engaging during structural change
- Understanding the importance of ‘ownership’ & how to achieve it
- Developing innovative ways to measure engagement
- Creating cost-effective engagement strategies
- Boosting engagement through your employer brand
There is no better way to engage an employee than through recognition at work – tie key corporate objectives to desired behaviors and reward employees for their actions.
Recognition programmes should really fall under a company-wide umbrella. The budget, recognition platform and how you can manage these are endless. Points based systems are the hot trend today. They allow businesses to pool their various programmes together and house them under a single area. Employees can earn points based on, for example, recognition surveys, service milestones, safety, performance, exceeding expectations, high achievement – the list goes on.
