Employee engagement is the key concern for most of the organizations today. They struggle hard to generate passion and devotion in the employees for their work place.
Employee engagement is business essential these days to help differentiate your business and contribute to your long-term success. Many understand this, but struggle to convey the significance and urgency for action to senior managers and CEOs.
A report by Bersin mentions only 13% of world employees are highly engaged, 63% disengaged and 24% actively disengaged resulting in lost productivity & innovation worth billions of dollars annually. But more importantly this has caused a serious dent to business competitiveness and opportunities impacting both top and bottom lines for future years as well.
As per Gallup, estimated cost of the economy for disengaged employees is $350 billion a year! This has forced most organizations to re-evaluate their performance management process, abandon their rating and ranking based performance management software & adopt a coaching and development model to realign with the new generation of workforce. This has imposed a new challenge for taking performance management systems to a new level.
The emerging business trends require feedback cycles to be ongoing and also real-time to manage performance. Necessary feedback to be offered in an informal way involving managers, peers & employees which also helps manage relationships better. This helps contribute towards organizations coaching and mentoring initiatives.
The new system should more than ever before address the innate psychological need of awards/recognition for achievements/quality performance. This empowerment contributes to satisfaction, encourages participation and higher performance from themselves and also from their teams. This invariably would drive engagement levels and also help build a positive cultural shift in motivating employees to achieve desired competencies, knowledge and behavior skills.
Last but not the least, one’s ability to focus is the primary driver of effectiveness. The foremost requirement, therefore, is to set clear expectations and define roles to enforce accountability and follow-up by tracking and monitoring progress of the set goals. This can dramatically improve overall effectiveness and organizations’ performance.
In this ever changing competitive business landscape the need is to have more frequent one-on-one interactions with employees. It has come to observation that attrition fell by 20-40 % when coaching and mentoring were deemed satisfactory. The one-to-one interactions for review (if not held monthly) are to be held at least once a quarter to maximize ones’ potential by leveraging their strength, discuss experience & training requirements, career plans for growth and to align employees with strategic corporate objectives and priorities.
The new system requires combining the focal points of Continuous feedback, Goals tracking, articulating shared goals and objectives and make performance reviews ongoing and continuous, which leads to employee engagement.