With the pandemic and shift to the online world, the talent pool has become much broader than we were used to. Our company’s location is no longer a limit, but more of a benefit as we can attract people from different areas. We just need to adjust our leadership styles to retain and keep them engaged and loyal. As much as we already had to adapt and change, employee engagement in the new normal is a hot topic, and as we learned at the meetup, there is still much more work to do for the times ahead.
How to keep our employees engaged and motivated while we are not in the same room?
How to enable them the work conditions that would help them be happy at work?
Most companies are shifting to a hybrid type of work, as this kind of work model is the closest to meeting all the employees’ needs in the new normal.
Hybrid work practice
Our guests at the meetup about employee engagement in the new normal, Elma Buljko from Siemens and Tilen Erman from Novartis, presented their hybrid work practice, and this is what we learned:
- There is no “one size fits all” model. You have to talk to your employees and develop a working model according to their concerns, doubts, fears, wishes, and ideas.
- The retention of employees has become more important than attraction, and for that, we have to rethink our talent development models.
- Empathy is an essential and most important skill we need for successfully navigating through the upcoming times.
- The second is trust. We need to start trusting our employees that they will do their job. Even though the “out of sight” experience automatically lights the red light of untrustworthiness in us, we need to turn it off and trust our workers.
- Connected to trust is empowerment. Let your employees shape their work themselves – when and where that is possible. You will be surprised by the results.
Online tools and methods
There are plenty of methods and online tools you can use to help you connect with distributed teams or remote workers but also on-site employees, empower them, and keep them satisfied at their jobs:
- Feedback: it should be done frequently. It helps leaders learn about the achievements, happiness, pains, and struggles of their employees.
- Regular 1on1 conversations between leader and team member. A great tool to use – 15five.
- Reward systems: help your workers recognize the good deeds with rewarding tools. We use Bonusly, Novartis has … and there are also others.
- Learning and upskilling: we need to encourage people to upgrade their knowledge every year and help them achieve personal goals, not just the companies.
- Understanding why we work and not just when and where we work: clear purpose and vision can work as safeguards for retaining our talents in the company.
If you wish to know more about the hybrid model of working, how to get started and what prerequisites you need, let us know at hello@corpohub.com.
