Value of Employee Engagement – 6 Ways to Engage your New Employees

Employee engagement often isn’t high on the list of priorities for companies looking for new hires. However, this is a critical error on the part of the recruiter, since disengaged employees are likely to leave their jobs more quickly. According to SHRM, only 34% of interviewed employees felt engaged at work, with 16% going so far as to say they’re disengaged entirely. The study has shown that employee engagement, in general, has dropped for the first time in the last 10 years as a result of major job market trend shifts in recent years.

People who don’t want to be in your office will start slacking off and generally be unmotivated to do their best at work. This can lead to not only a lower quality of work but also to a growing dissatisfaction with the current office culture for everyone on staff. As you’re using Jobs OneGlobe to hire great employees, let’s also discuss how you can retain them for longer. How can you adopt employee engagement in your company and what’s the value of engaging employees in 2022?

What’s the Real Value of Employee Engagement?

As you move forward with writing and publishing job listings on Jobs OneGlobe, you’ll start arranging interviews with prospective job candidates. For you to retain new hires for as long as possible, you’ll need to apply certain employee engagement methodologies from day one. People will vet your company just as much as you’ll vet them – it’s a two-way process. You want to leave a good first impression with potential hires, especially if you plan to groom them for leadership roles based on their CV. According to Gallup findings, here’s why employee engagement is so important:

• Engaged employees exhibit 41% fewer absences
• Engaged employees are 17% more productive on average
• Engaged staff exhibits 24% less turnover and higher retention
• Engaged staff exhibits a 20% increase in sales and 10% in customer ratings
• Engaged employees are 21% more profitable for the employer
  
  

In short, employee engagement leads to better productivity, higher loyalty, and higher motivation for the staff. You want to make sure that your staff feels like they belong in your business and that they’re appreciated and compensated for their efforts.

“To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.” – Doug Conant

1. Rethink your Onboarding Process

Your new staff’s employee experience begins when you start interviewing them. They’ll start forming their opinions of your company and whether and how they’d fit into the business culture you’re presenting them with. To ensure that new employees have a great employee engagement experience, you should rethink your onboarding process.

Onboarding represents the initial training and welcome period each employee goes through. How detailed is your employee training? Which tools are you going to teach new hires? Are you going to assign senior staff as mentors to monitor and coach new hires? These are important questions to ask before you start hiring new employees as you’ll want to pay close attention to their initial weeks and months with the company.

2. Provide Employees with Learning Opportunities

Employee engagement will require you to provide various learning opportunities for your staff. Everyone wants to learn new things and improve on what they do. Professional development is integral to the healthy engagement of your employees and their satisfaction with working for your company. A great way to start is to provide them with language learning opportunities that can greatly expand their networking possibilities and CVs.

OneGlobe Language Learning is a language learning program designed to make casual, approachable learning possible. Employees who engage in OneGlobe Language Learning will gain access to practical lessons in over 40 languages, as well as the ability to use Mondly Kids and Mondly AR. By providing your employees with these and similar opportunities to learn they’ll be more content with the benefits you’re providing them with as an employer.

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3. Consider Adopting a Hybrid Work Environment

Today’s employees want to work in more dynamic and flexible work environments. Hybrid work has become especially popular in recent years due to the global pandemic and the effects it had on the daily commute. Hybrid work consists of you enabling employees to work from home, and the office, throughout the week. While engaging employees “less” may seem counterintuitive, it’s a very good employee engagement mechanism.

Different employees can rotate their home/office workflow weekly so that everyone gets to work in a hybrid environment. This is a very exciting prospect, especially for employees who are parents, have physical difficulties, or work in digital professions which don’t necessarily require their explicit in-office presence. By allowing employees to work remotely some days, your employee engagement efforts will flourish and you’ll be seen as a great employer.

“Employees engage with employers and brands when they’re treated as humans worthy of respect.” – Meghan M. Biro

4. Audit your Employees’ Toolset and Equipment

Once you start bringing in new employees into your company, you should ensure that they have enough equipment to work with. Not only that, but your equipment should be functional and up-to-date with the modern industry standards to ensure good productivity and engagement. For example, if you’re running a digital marketing business, you should make sure that your employees have good PCs and legal software to work with.

Don’t ask your employees to bring their equipment to the company because that’s unprofessional. Instead, equip your office space with all the equipment which would be considered standard in your industry. This is a great employee engagement mechanism that will help your new employees be more productive and motivated to work harder. Working with poor or outdated equipment will have an opposite effect on their engagement, often leading them to question their decision to accept working in your company.

5. Reward your Employees for their Performance

Everyone wants to feel appreciated, especially if they spend eight hours, five days a week, working for your company. You can reward your employees in a variety of creative ways, both personally and professionally. Firstly, you can create a reward and recognition (R&R) program within your company to track employee productivity and reward individuals periodically. Or, you can simply reward exemplary teams or departments ad hoc and without much planning.

Rewards such as professional seminars and courses, in addition to being propped up in the company’s eyes through a newsletter or a piece of digital content, are great. But, you can also reward employees with vouchers, coupons, or gifts unrelated to their work. This is a part of employee engagement very few employers have managed to nail down to a T over the years. Start by making sure that your employees know how much they mean to your company and work your way forward from there.

6. Don’t Micromanage – Offer Guidance Whenever You’re Asked

The best way to ensure that your employees are happy with their professional experience is to trust them. Avoid micromanagement as much as possible and trust that your employees are responsible adults who know how to do their jobs. Once the onboarding and training period is over, you should allow your employees some autonomy in how they approach their tasks.

Each employee will tackle their tasks in unique ways, but as long as the work is ultimately done, you shouldn’t look too much into it. Every person is an individual in their own right and controlling how people work or think won’t end well for your employee retention. Adopt employee engagement from the perspective of being a mentor or a colleague, not a supervisor or an authority figure hunting for mistakes.

“Your number one customers are your people.” – Ian Hutchinson

Adopting Employee Engagement with Jobs OneGlobe

Ultimately, why should you devote resources and efforts toward employee engagement? According to Brilliant Ink, 54% of employees didn’t feel valued by their organizations, with 51% lacking a sense of belonging in their companies. This has led to 40% of employees stating that they’d likely leave their jobs in the next 3-6 months if nothing changes. You want to retain talented, devoted professionals in your company for as long as possible.

The best way to do that is to tend to their professional needs and engage them as individuals looking for growth and appreciation. Use Jobs OneGlobe to publish your job listings and attract new candidates to your job vacancies. Start showing your care toward your staff from the get-go, by exhibiting it during job interviews. The job candidates who choose to send their CVs and consider working for your company will appreciate you treating them with respect and are far more likely to stay with your business for years to come.