We hear a lot about the companies that are making a huge impact on their employees with fancy and expensive engagement schemes.
Normally it’s businesses like Google or Facebook for example, who offer amazing perks and team building activities, thanks to a large budget to draw from.
So what can you do if you don’t have that big HR budget in place to support such extravagant luxuries?
We have already spoken a bit about how in reality, your people might not want such fancy things as sleeping pods and swimming pools.
In a post last month we gave some statistics from a study on what your employees really want. Recap on what your employees really desire here.
It points out that what they really want are perks that are far more practical and reasonable and more than likely, there are things that you could be doing that are completely free.
But before I go into that, I want to talk about why today’s workforce is so unengaged.
We have spoken before about the productivity crisis in the UK. You can recap on productivity blunder here.
I believe that all of this can be linked back to the recession. To put it simply, after the recession employers wanted more for less. For example, a lot of people were made redundant during this period and it left the remaining employees to pick up the slack on top of their existing workload.
Perhaps this new way of working simply became the “norm” and is now expected?
There are so many horror stories out there about exploited workers from the likes of Amazon, Uber and many more.
Although those are extreme cases, what it boils down to is when employees feel neglected it impacts their engagement within the organisation and then their productivity.
Beyond thinking about what perks you offer you should be asking yourself if your managers have realistic expectations about workload, if your employees feel motivated to come to work in the mornings and far more fundamental issues that throwing money at won’t solve.
The best place to start is to simply find out where you stand with your employees and what they want.
A great way to achieve this is to simply ask them. At Reality HR we would suggest using a tool like an employee survey.
One that we highly recommend is engagement multiplier. Every 90 days Engagement Multiplier delivers a simple short anonymous survey to your team regarding the state of engagement within your organisation. The answers to the questions will reveal valuable and actionable insights.
We then step in to help you quickly move toward setting actionable and achievable goals using those insights, getting you firmly on the path towards greater engagement. Small actions quickly add up to real improvement.
Engagement Multiplier is currently running a free 30 day trial and they have put together a web page specifically for us to share with you! You can watch their video on why engagement matters and sign up for the trial. Simply follow the link below: