What are the key employee engagement challenges for the next decade?

Need to know:

• Strong levels of employee engagement will be needed to help build resilient organisations in competitive and evolving markets.
• Work is becoming more employee-led, and employers will need to focus on being agile, flexible and catering for the individual.
• A holistic approach, which encompasses all elements of wellbeing, the employee experience, and non-traditional working patterns, will only become more important over the next decade.

The world of work is changing, and the last decade has seen the pace of this change only become more rapid. With it, the very nature of the employee experience and engagement is evolving. Considering the seismic shifts seen since 2000, what do employers need to know to prepare for the decade to come?

Driving factors

The main drivers of change are likely to be technology and the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are having on ways of working. In turn, in order to remain competitive in a global market, organisations will have to become more agile and responsive to customer demands, with a workforce that can support this.

Mercer’s Global talent trends survey, published in February 2019, found that more than half of the executives questioned expect AI and automation to replace one in five of their organisation’s current jobs. Meanwhile, more than two-fifths (43%) of executives in top growth businesses cited low or declining employee engagement as a primary concern.

As employers prepare themselves for the future of work, they must consider how to manage this key human capital risk. David Wreford, partner at Mercer, says: “The world of work is changing, the expectations of the workforce are changing, and they are changing increasingly quickly. We know that people feel drowned out by a lot of the information and the change that is going on around them.”

The key for employers is in the way they communicate with staff; this must be done in an honest, authentic way that will ensure employees feel engaged and connected to the organisation as it grows and evolves, adds Wreford.

Engagement lessons

The start of a new decade usually heralds a certain period of reflection; when considering the future of work, what lessons can be learned from past engagement exercises?

One of the key lessons centres on measuring engagement, and further than that, being seen to do something with the data, says Emma Bridger, managing director of People Lab.

“[Employers have] spent a lot of time and money measuring engagement, but done very little with what happens with insight,” she says. “It’s creating distrust among employees. There’s a greater demand to really see the results and what’s happening with that insight.

"[Employers] are starting to wake up to that now, and say ‘actually we could measure less, but do more in terms of integrating engagement into our culture, and adopting it as a management and leadership philosophy’.”

Employee-led working practices

Another key change that affects engagement initiatives is the changing nature of work, as shaped by employee demand and expectation.

“The employee lens is becoming increasingly important, because organisations are competing much more for talent,” says Wreford. “So they are bending more to the requirements of individuals, and that means much more personalisation creeping into the way that the [employee experience] proposition needs to work.”

This rise of the individual employee experience is also due to hyper-personalisation outside of work, through tailored, on-demand services such as Netflix and Amazon, says Bridger. “We have these really slick user-centric experiences outside of work, but the world of work hasn’t caught up with that and employees are starting to demand better experiences inside the organisation,” she explains.

Employers should, therefore, realise that just like consumers, employees can vote with their feet; they can choose whether to be at the organisation, how they are going to work when they are there, and what they say about the employer externally. The next decade will likely bring with it an increasing need to create great experiences that result in engagement, so that employees are working with their employers, not against them.

Broadening the spectrum of work

Another factor affecting an engagement strategies is the increase in agile working practices; since the 2008 financial crisis, zero-hour contracts have become more prevalent, as too has the number of employees working remotely or flexibly.

This has led to a need for businesses to reassess traditional approaches to keeping valued members of their workforce engaged and motivated.

Deborah Frost, chief executive officer at Personal Group, says: “After the financial crisis, a lot of us thought [that] zero-hours contracts, temporary contracts and agency ways of working [were] temporary, and it [would] settle down to the traditional employed environment. But what we’re all recognising is that the contingent workforce, or the gig economy, is here to stay.

"Employers really need to shift how they think about engagement to a much wider, broader pool than just their employed staff, because those are the people they rely on when they get busier, or they need them to cover holidays. That challenge is quite considerable for employers.”

Even among those with traditional employment contracts, remote and flexible working is a double-edged sword, says Dean Hunter, founder of Hunter Adams. “Flexibility is one of the two main game changers to culture, along with visible career paths," he says. "Yet we do see engagement levels a lot lower in employees who are remote. They don’t get the communications, they don’t feel they are being considered for career promotion opportunities.”

As employees increasingly look for flexibility, engagement strategies cannot remain tied to ever more outdated models of work. This will need to be a key consideration for many employers in the coming years.

Future challenges

In addition to the rising prominence of the individual, future engagement strategies will also be shaped around the key pillars of mental, physical and financial wellbeing.

“There’s a whole view that has arisen over the last 10 years that employers have a responsibility to think about the whole person that is at work, rather than simply [that they] come to work, do a job and go home,” says Frost.

Due to the shift towards a consumer-like experience, the approach to engagement will also have to become more involved and holistic, and tick-box exercises must be left behind, says Katerina Psychopaida, principal at Mercer.

“For the last 10 years it was, ‘let’s ask a few questions and have an engagement programme with a heavy communication background to convince people that we are a great place to work, and that we have a purpose that they should all be aligned to’," she concludes. "Now, it is, ‘how can I understand and empathise with the employee as my end user, and really redesign the experience so that I empower them, rather than just convincing them that this is a great place to work’?”

For more future-focused insight, there's still time to register for Employee Benefits Connect 2020, taking place at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge on Wednesday 26 February.

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