How Modern HR Practices Improve Employee Engagement and Culture
HR has always played a big role in building up the company culture. Done right, HR teams can do wonders to help encourage top talent to join, train, and thrive in a company. On the flip side, poor or outdated HR practices can turn away top talent faster than you can blink.
Everyone has a job to do, but there is a big difference between employees working in a job they like and one that leads straight to burnout.
Adopting modern HR practices and a culture of employee engagement is great for your bottom line. It’s how you’ll increase retention rates and improve your business across the board. But where to start? This guide covers everything you need to know:
Modern Workplace Problems Affecting Business' Bottom Line
There could be a considerable number of issues affecting your management style, employee happiness, productivity, and retention. If you aren’t carefully tracking diversity metrics, for example, you could end up severely underpaying top talent, stagnating the ideas flowing through your business, and hampering your business’ success.
Improving engagement isn’t just about ensuring you have enough underrepresented groups, either—it’s giving everyone the chance to thrive. While management will play a significant role in this, HR teams still have a lot of sway.
For example, adopting modern HR practices and employee engagement trends will greatly impact employee engagement and reduce burnout.
Low Employee Engagement
Image sourced from Gallup
According to a Gallup poll, only around 31% of employees believe they are actively engaged in their work, and 18% state they are actively disengaged. Being one of the businesses with actively engaged employees is critical, not just because it makes you a better workplace.
Gallup also conducted a study to determine the relationship between business performance and employee engagement. Overall, companies with engaged employees outperformed businesses with disengaged teams on 11 key metrics. Companies in the top quartile, for example, were, on average, 23% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile.
Disengaged employees make more mistakes, don’t work hard, aren’t as creative, and want to leave. That’s why HR teams need to adopt modern employee engagement strategies.
Employee Burnout
Another reason why employee engagement is important is that it affects burnout rates. Burnout affects productivity, increases turnover and errors, and so much more. A burnt-out employee, even if they do stay and are physically there, tends to be mentally disengaged.
Employee disengagement costs money in one way or another. The fact that a Mercer report found that 40% of employees feel burnt out due to exhaustion and 37% due to a heavy workload means that HR teams and management directly impact burnout rates and engagement.
Top Modern HR Practices that Boost Company Culture
Building a healthy culture takes time and the right engagement strategies.
An employee engagement plan focusing on the primary drivers of employee satisfaction is a good place to start. It’s not all about employee happiness, either. Models of employee engagement always include recognition programs, development programs, improved feedback systems, and more.
To help you build your successful employee engagement plan, for example, you’ll want to adopt these modern HR practices:
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
A Streamlined and Communicative Hiring Process
Your efforts should start right in the hiring process. You can use tools like Oleeo’s ATS software, for example, to help create better job roles and postings, filter through candidates, and then eventually manage candidates so that you start your new relationship off on the right foot.
Starting with a streamlined, communicative approach towards the hiring and onboarding process will set the right tone for the rest of their career with your business. Furthermore, excellent cultural practices can be used to bring in top talent, who are increasingly more willing to take a pay cut as large as 30% to work at a job they like.
Ongoing and Open Communication
Another way HR teams can improve employee retention across company sizes is to improve communication channels.
It should be easy and potentially anonymous to provide feedback, get support, and ask HR or upper management questions. Frequent conversations can help employees feel like they are on the right page. Ongoing conversations also make employees feel like there is room for change or development.
That’s why, to boost employee retention, your HR team and managers should run regular meetings or hold open-door policies.
Improved Workflows for Streamlined Days
Being overworked leads to burnout and low engagement. One of the easiest ways to reduce that workload is to introduce automation. Introducing automation, however, requires a whole overhaul of your systems.
Solutions like a cloud integration platform can speed things up by getting all your disparate systems working together. Once set up, you can considerably lessen the workload for your staff, giving them more headspace to do the work only people can do.
Recognize and Reward Hard Work
Engaged employees are often the ones who receive employee recognition and rewards. Personal growth is a massive part of anyone’s career, so provide constructive feedback, keep track of accomplishments, and start reward programs to maintain employee morale.
Each person’s individual goals are unique, so your recognition programs should be diverse enough to appeal to everyone. Some, for example, want monetary rewards. Others want career opportunities.
Be Flexible and Adaptable
Flexible work arrangements are another easy way to improve employee morale and increase engagement. It can be hard to fit in career goals with personal responsibilities, so giving your employees wiggle room can provide extra support at minimal disruption to you. For example, if parents can work from home if their kids are sick, they can keep up their productivity instead of taking a sick day themselves. Flexible work hours can also help employees take better care of their health since doctors and dentists have limited out-of-office hours.
Be Somewhere Employees Can Develop
Development opportunities are another way to form a positive environment. Your HR team or managers can offer growth opportunities through coaching sessions, in-house development programs, or sponsorship.
Improve Your Leadership
Leadership can have a positive impact on workplace culture, but to do that, you and your HR teams need to hold managers accountable. In a LinkedIn survey, 68% of respondents claimed they would leave their job if they had a bad manager. This number increases among the younger generations.
The best way to create a strong culture of good management is to have your HR team organize leadership training and regular one-on-one performance reviews with managers.
Image sourced from LinkedIn
Create a Safe Space for Feedback
Employee feedback is how you improve every aspect of your business. You can get this information directly through one-on-one meetings, employee surveys, or polls. Regular check-ins can also help you understand job satisfaction rates and how healthy your company culture is currently.
Top Tools to Help You Improve Your Employee Engagement
Your HR team won’t be the only critical role, either. Your HR team and your staff need the right tools to help them with their work. These tools will help support your employees, which in turn helps boost business performance. Here are just a few to consider:
Relationship Management Systems
Relationship management systems are essential for managing customers. They can also be used to help manage candidates and employees. CRM and ATS systems, for example, can help improve the hiring process and, in turn, bring better people onto your payroll.
Managing each relationship (keeping note of birthdays, accomplishments, goals, and more) can help HR and managers provide better support and guidance throughout an employee’s career.
A User-Friendly Intranet
A user-centric intranet is another easy way to keep your staff connected. It should be intuitive to use, full of opportunities, and where staff can keep up to date with any company-wide day-to-day communications.
If spots are available for one-on-one coaching or other internal career opportunities, they should be advertised there. Make the intranet a one-stop shop to show employees they can develop, improve, and progress in their careers in your company.
Tools Your Staff Need to Work Better
One of the HR teams' duties is ensuring staff have the tools to do their jobs effectively. This can and should also extend to receiving equipment and solution requests from departments, which then get brought up with higher-ups.
Giving your staff the tools they need to work better, particularly if it’s based on their requests, is an easy way to increase engagement and decrease burnout.
A customer service team, for example, can often only take so many calls per day based on the number of phones and representatives. In this case, they might request to switch to one of the top business VoIP phone systems. This would make it easier to take calls and also let that team benefit from the addition of auto attendants, AI virtual assistants, and more.
Ready to Kickstart Employee Engagement in Your Business?
Modern HR practices work to help support employees in all their goals. They do this by helping support staff in their work, organizing development and reward programs, and training management so that the lousy boss curse is a thing of the past. Part of these practices can be accomplished simply by changing focus; others, like improving the onboarding process, are best done with tools.
Improving employee engagement is not a quick fix but provides results. Invest in these top recommendations, and you can start benefitting from an engaged, productive workforce that sees its future with you.