With LinkedIn purchasing employee engagement platform Glint, no doubt 2019 will be crammed with people telling us how they’ve smashed Employee Engagement out of the park, even though turnover is still high and brand advocacy is non-existent.
Now I don’t pretend to be a culture or “engagement” expert; the only mantra I stick to is that if you generally look after people, treat them well, be transparent, offer them a fair rate of pay and benefits comparable to what they do but most of all respect them you’re well on your way to par for the course. This is what I call a positive “employee experience” which results in guess what…employee engagement. Like with anything; find out what you want and then go backwards to the root cause.
So why am I worried that EE might become the new buzzword (sorry candidate experience)? With the B-word, “gig economy”, roles changing due to tech/automation, organisations rethinking how they operate, the “workplace” has never been more up in the air in living memory. Add to that struggling economies, beckoning trade wars, the cost of living rising and more and more roles being switched to self-employed/zero hour contracts. Not good.
All of the above equals a very messy landscape when it comes to the modern organisation. Employment engagement is not as simple as a tech platform or a blanket approach. The gig economy is not black and white; it is privilege over protection. Some people will choose it; some people have no choice. Don’t always presume that everyone wants the same thing in the workplace or that it’s even a workplace. Do they have a job or is it a task? Our mindsets need to change almost as quickly as the landscapes we operate in.
I think the organisations that will nail “people engagement” in the future are the ones that will get real and thoroughly begin to understand personal drivers for all levels in their organisation. A high earner will have very different to say a low skilled low earning individual, but they are just as important. I have no idea what the workplace of the future will look like, but as organisations lets listen to our people, listen to their individual circumstances and create experiences based on what they need, not what we want. Then we can say we have truly cracked people engagement.
