Managers occasionally graded on their team’s occupational health, a vague metric that measures employee satisfaction in both their work and personal lives. Employee engagement, which assesses how devoted employees are to helping their firm thrive, is a related idea that may not as often evaluate. While 71 percent of CEOs believe employee engagement is critical to their success, just 15% of employees in the United States believe they engaged. Unfortunately, for businesses, looking at the workforce via either the satisfaction or engagement lens reveals a workforce in crisis – upwards of 70% of U.S. workers are considering and/or actively seeking a new job.
What is the story here? Workplace stagnation and the prospect of a better job elsewhere, which are generally described not just as one with more compensation, but as one that offers a route to personal and professional growth and upward mobility. Let us assess your company’s employee development and engagement activities rather than listing the litany of failures. Many employees – at all levels — are dissatisfied with their positions, with no advice on how to develop or pivot in their careers and achieve the dignity of meaningful, impactful work as a result of the epidemic.
This article seeks to provide a clear action plan for analyzing your employees’ levels of engagement and taking specific efforts to develop the sort of devoted and dependable staff required to survive and grow in today’s industry. We discovered a number of frequent and recurrent flaws in career-development methods when investigating employee retention for our firm. These flaws are likely to be recognizable to most Fortune 500 companies, as well as growing, high-growth startups.
We looked at the actions and tactics firms use to link their skills needs with workers’ capabilities and ambitions — especially, how they advance employees into roles that are both desirable to employees and necessary to employers. We discovered major behavioral-design flaws in three important areas: their strategy framework for employee engagement and progression, their implementation process and templates, and their goal setting and rewards.
We looked at upskilling and tuition reimbursement policies and spending, as well as individualized employee future-fit assessments, tools employee career pathway modeling and advancement, and early-in-career and diverse-hire career-progression programs, to get a better understanding of the companies’ strategic framework.
We looked at onboarding, employee performance and development, management feedback, and succession planning as implementation methods and templates. We looked at goals and awards at the manager and vice president levels that directly related to their actions and success in building and progressing employee careers.
Let us look at how your organization is doing with employee development and engagement. How many of the following questions do you know the answer to? In the last two years, has your firm conducted a procedure to identify skills or talent gaps across departments? Did your firm create role taxonomy for important positions as part of this process? Do you have a system and tools in place to map existing employees to that taxonomy, whether they are from within or outside the organization?
