Like the events of 2020, the future of work can be unpredictable. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Your organization has a lot of information inside it that can help you propel your workforce and your business forward in 2021.
Employee engagement will continue to be an important part of an effective and integrated talent strategy. But engagement isn’t the only component of achieving business success.
In this article, we’ll dive into 7 reliable talent strategies to move your business forward in 2021 including:
Employee engagement plays a critical role in determining and driving the success of an organization.The better you can define (and measure) employee engagement in your organization, the better you will be at mobilizing success.
Use (and share) a clear definition of employee engagement in your organization. Don’t confuse engagement with employee satisfaction or employee experience. It can make measuring and improving engagement less effective.
Our definition of employee engagement is the strength of the mental and emotional connection employees feel toward their work, team, and place of work. Here’s a breakdown of those components:
People are complex—many factors impact their level of engagement. And those factors can change over time. Your employee engagement program needs to evolve to understand and adjust to their needs.
A successful employee engagement strategy is centers on the use of feedback from all employee levels to:
Focus your efforts on the unique aspects that drive engagement within your organization. Tying your efforts to business metrics that matter (and ensuring your workforce understands how engagement affects their work) will help you be more successful.
Profit and loss aren't the only indications of organizational success. Engagement metrics should be connected with business outcomes and shared throughout the year. This keeps engagement top of mind for employees and ensures all leaders understand and can make the connection.
To understand the impact of engagement on your business, you need a clear picture of what you hope to get out of your engagement initiatives. Here are some examples:
Once you've figured out how engagement fits into the bigger picture of organizational success, communicate that impact regularly. Speak in the language of your leaders and constantly connect those dots.
When employees are engaged, they perform better. And when employees clearly understand their performance expectations they are more engaged. If you want to understand how engagement impacts business success, you need to find the link between engagement and performance. But drawing a connection requires more than just improving one initiative and then shifting to the other.
To successfully connect engagement and performance, you need to:
Your employee engagement data is complex, but the influence it can have on employee and business performance should be clear.
Our research has shown that when goals and accountabilities are clear, employees are 2.8x more likely to be highly engaged. And when employees believe they will be recognized, they are 2.7x more likely to be highly engaged. Finding opportunities like this to tell stories about your data is a great way to prove the connection to senior leaders.
Managers play an important part in defining and driving the employee experience. But they might not be equipped to make an impact without support from leadership, ongoing training, or access to data and information.
When they have the tools and resources they need to be successful, managers can:
You can play an important role in supporting and enabling your managers. Include them in the strategic vision for your talent initiatives and help them visualize the big picture. This may require in-depth training on the purpose of the organization’s goals and how their team is expected to make an impact.
Some examples include:
Beyond identifying the right tools or resources to empower your managers, your tools need to be consistent and up-to-date. Your tools should integrate with the systems you use and the talent strategies you put in place.
Your employees, managers, and leaders need integrated systems for engagement and performance management to work together.
This includes:
To encourage employees to own their performance and career growth you need to invest in the right tools. Pairing the right software with your strategy for employee success will help you achieve your goals together.
For too long organizations have been overwhelmed with the process of performance management. Inconsistent and siloed practices are being replaced with more efficient and continuous models.
Employee performance can make a huge impact on your organization’s bottom line. To do so, your performance management program should:
Your performance management strategy should be balanced with good performance conversations, flexible coaching tools, and metrics that help you achieve your goals. A modern approach to performance management:
The most successful organizations help their employees reach their highest potential throughout the employee lifecycle. Achieving employee, team, and business success cannot happen solely by improving engagement. Your talent strategy should:
In the world of work, anything is possible. But one thing is certain—your business will only be as successful as your employees. No matter how you determine success, your strategy should be purposeful, proactive, and data-driven.
As you plan for 2021, center your talent strategies around the business goals that matter most. Find every possible opportunity to connect your people practices to those larger goals. This approach will help you gain credibility with leaders in your organization and make your engagement and performance efforts a clear driver of business success.
Developing a strategy for business success is an ongoing, integrated process. These strategies are the foundation for success next year and beyond. To learn more about how the best places to work are preparing for the future of work, download our 2020 Employee Engagement Trends Report.
Published December 3, 2020 | Written By Jocelyn Stange