Have you noticed a shifting trend where many corporates are planning and investing a significant percentage of their budget and efforts in strengthening employee engagement, rather than being focused only on enhancing customer experience.
For decades, companies have been investing heavily on customer focus, but lately, we see that there has been a paradigm shift. Companies are ensuring that employee engagement takes the center stage and have realized that everything revolves around people as their most treasured assets.
While improved productivity and employee satisfaction are top drivers of employee engagement, the emotional commitment an employee has towards the organization and its overall vision, also enhances customer experiences and wellbeing of the business.
What are companies doing about it and how are they using Technology as an aid?
People and their unique skills are commodities that are invaluable today and they are as important as the customers. While over 85% of the employers think/assume that their employees leave them for more money, in reality, only approximately 10% of employees do. Companies that had greater employee engagement saw reduced turnover as the employees were more ‘focused’ than their industry counterparts who incur heavily income wise, however are even crippled by their high employee turnover.
Companies are strategizing and working on building a strong culture, where every employee is provided with a working environment, which allows them not to only give their best, but also do it in their own way.
This means companies are now investing to provide the right work environment, right technology, encouraging a positive culture, and also investing on individual development and growth. Employee engagement, creating flexible career paths, fun at work, family day, rewards & recognition are some aspects being taken seriously at companies, that know how to leverage the real power of employee engagement.
While technology is advancing at a lightning speed, leading organizations have realized that they can leverage technology to improve the way employees go about doing their daily tasks, which in turn augurs the performance and in turn, elevates job satisfaction. Making ‘continuous Improvement a culture’ helps unleash many bright ideas that make work more efficient kill mundane tasks, and make employees more productive.
To bring this culture to a 100% adoption, Continuous Improvement can be adopted as an org-wide goal, to ensure everyone is able to create new possibilities and enhance performance. It is not only the prerogative of the HR, learning team, or leaders to own, exhibit and drive engagement, but also every employee (Individual contributor or a People Leader) should own this opportunity to be engaged.
Most common misconception is that to ensure we get our people engaged better; we would need to just show them the water hole, however in contrast, the adage goes, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink”. To develop the culture of engagement, first we need to create the right environment with the use of technology that drives our processes, people and everything around.
Our core values at CDK Global, (‘Be Open’, ‘Stay Curious’, “Own it’ and ‘Create Possibilities’), are rhetoric of all the parts that make the melting pot of being a wholly engaged organization. We have been tying up with online learning portals like LinkedIn, Udemy alongwith in-house learning platforms to create opportunities for people to explore new skills and use them to improve their own processes.
We have also ensured we create opportunities for advanced T&D for employees willing to upgrade their skills. Hackathon is another brilliant platform that helps people connect, be excited about creating / inventing something that helps unleash the full potential. On the other hand, we have been using various tools to measure, monitor, supervise, aid, mentor and reward people on their performances.
By using the right tools like a ‘Performance Management System’, a digital one-to-one feedback system, rewarding and recognizing on a digital public platform called Spotlight, has helped in being transparent, fair and build structured processes for both employees and leaders.
We have created our own niche awards on the recognition portal, that we use to appreciate people’s good work on core performance, Best Continuous Improvement Champ, highest Learning hours, an ‘Enlightener Award’ (for someone who imparts knowledge, shares their best practices with others), Special Recognition Awards for people who have gone beyond the mile to extend help to a colleague or improve customer experience.
We have also been using all channels of communication like Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, etc to foster effective team collaboration and people connect. While, what we are building with the help of technology is an inclusive environment for everyone to be themselves, learn, be excited to explore and grow, we have also ensured that all weaves into a highly engaged workforce.
