7 Key takeaways from our Employee Engagement & Well-being event!
7 Key takeaways from our Employee Engagement & Well-being event
Research has found that company culture, work-life balance & purpose are ever-increasingly important factors in workplace satisfaction. It’s clear with Gen Z entering the workplace & Millennials continuing to progress their way up the career ladder, this trend is only set to continue…
So, what can employers do to ensure they’re future-proofed and appealing to the next generation? Well, employee engagement & well-being is the perfect starting point. But what do you need to be aware of and what can you implement to create an environment full of engaged & healthy employees?
To answer this common quandary, we partnered with yulife to put on an ‘Employee Engagement & Well-being’ event to find out!
If you missed our event or enjoyed the free bar a little too much and need reminders of what happened, here are our key takeaways.
1) Millennials. They aren’t all that bad after all…
When you hear the word ‘millennials’ what words/phrases spring to mind? Now, how many of those have positive connotations? Probably not many. But why not? Businesses need to be utilising what makes millennials different, what makes them stand out.
With millennials, there is a focus on diversity, technology, immediacy, they’re direct and challenging, so how can your businesses adapt to these challenges and utilise their collective mindset.
2) Skill Vs Will
The age-old question in recruitment, ‘skill vs will’ rears its head once again. A challenge for all operational & HR professionals within the recruitment sector is cultivating an engaged and high performing workforce. Pitting the two (will & skill) against each other raises another question, ‘why?’. Why pit them against one another? Both need to go hand in hand to establish an engaged and happy workforce.
Look at it this way, if your workforce is only 5/10 (50%) on their skill and 5/10 (again, 50%) on their motivation then they are only working at 25% of their potential performance. Therefore, if you implemented a strategy to upskill all of your workforce so they’re 10/10 skilled (100%), but their motivation factor remains at 5/10 (50%), they can still only reach 50% of their potential. This is the reason why there needs to be a strategy in place for upskilling and ‘upwilling’ your workforce.
Motivation is complex, it’s dynamic and it’s unique to every individual. A difficulty with improving motivation is that it can be difficult to quantify and if you can’t quantify it, how can you improve it? (Good luck HR & Operations professionals!) It is vitally essential that you take the time to discover what motivates people at a deeper level. Motivations change over a period of time and it is important that you stay connected & in tune with your team to know what is motivating them at any given time.
Discover what motivates people at a deeper level. Many know what their end goal is but are unaware of exactly how they are going to get there. This provides an opportunity for employers to help bridge that gap by putting steps into place to help employees reach their goals and ensure there are no surface misalignments.
3) Outputs > presenteeism
The UK has some of the longest working hours in the western world but suffers from having some of the lowest productivity rates, and millennials are onto this. There have been numerous articles within the recruitment space and Labour announced their plans in supporting a move to a 4-day working week. Businesses must focus on building an outcome-focused environment, rather than focusing on the number of hours an employee spends at their desk.
Ask yourself, what is more important, people putting the hours in or people getting results? Because this is important to engagement & well-being levels within any organisation.
4) Personal development is critical
In the introduction we mentioned, ‘Millennials continue to move up the career ladder’ and this raises a couple of different elements. Firstly, as Millennials are focused on immediacy, they want promotions annually. As a business, you need to build in micro-promotions to help quench this thirst. Do people in your business know what steps they need to take to earn their next promotion? Not knowing what you need to do to continue to progress your career can lead to disengagement within the business.
Millennials don’t just buy into job titles; they want managers who invest in their career and their development.
An important aspect of creating an environment in which millennial & Gen Z employees thrive is to promote constant learning.
5) Enable managers to engage their teams
Bad managers result in 44% of employees leaving their positions each year. Millennials can be particularly aware of this as they are less concerned with any negative undertones of job-hopping.
Businesses who invest in upskilling their managers to have the tools & behaviours to effectively engage talent will ultimately have the most efficient & happy workforce.
6) Benefits certainly help
Providing benefits to complement a culture of well-being can have numerous benefits. Stress accounts for 35% of all work-related ill health cases and 43% of working days lost due to ill health. Simply having a culture where people are encouraged to be active and eat well not only re-energises people, it helps them focus, compartmentalise and prioritise, all of which are useful skills.
Interestingly, the following % of employees say they would always choose an employer which positively contributes to their well-being, even if it meant earning less money:
All = 53%
Baby bloomers = 47%
Gen X = 52%
Millennials = 59%
Gig workers = 64%
7) Practical tips
Make the most of employee surveys, anonymous feedback and employee focus groups. Each of these will provide base-line statistics as well as information on how to improve engagement & well-being.
Other practical steps to help promote well-being are to:
Connect with people around you
Be active
Keep learning
Give to others
Be mindful
Is ensuring employee engagement & well-being an easy process? No. But if you keep those key values in mind when looking at your company culture, you will be on the right track.
Interested in attending future events? Contact Natasha South today on natasha@caminopartners.co.uk
