Struggling to retain the best talent and grow your team to move your company forward?

Employees are an organisation’s lifeblood. They are the driving force behind your company, the ones putting the wheels in motion and keeping it functioning smoothly.

Covid-19 brought about fundamental changes in the work environment and increased the need for recruitment drives. Employers had to constantly adjust their human resource plans in response to the changing restrictions, and others were left with no choice but to let employees go or enforce work on a skeleton basis. As a result, with businesses now resuming back into normality, many employers are finding themselves severely struggling to recruit the right people.

Research shows that one of the best ways to retain your most valuable talent within the company is by keeping them constantly engaged (Harvard Business Review, 2020). Therefore, it is now more important than ever for employers to focus on keeping their current workforce by ensuring that their employees are engaged within their job and the company. Staff turnover and recruitment drives come at a high cost both financially and time-wise, and ensuring your workforce is engaged and invested in their jobs and the company can help with retaining your existing talent. Investing in your present employees and putting in place an engagement plan helps ensure that they have the necessary conditions to thrive in their current job. As a result, besides having an increase in employee satisfaction, businesses also report an increase in productivity and efficiency. Employee engagement has become more important in recent years as businesses have begun to recognize its value, but numbers remain low on average, according to Gallup studies, which show that only 30% of employees have felt properly engaged at work in the last 18 years.

Having a strong employee engagement framework in place also keeps your employees motivated and aligned on the core goals after they have been recruited. A shared strategy brings with it a strong sense of engagement within your company, which then yields better results in general while helping with building bonds and relationships between colleagues and consequently increasing their drive and motivation. The first step to increasing employee engagement is by understanding how your company is currently performing when it comes to keeping your team engaged. This can be done via our free Business Health Check or via various online diagnostic tools in the form of surveys.

There are four key factors for improving employee engagement and retention within your organisation:

  • Employ the right people – employee engagement starts at the recruitment stage in which you have the opportunity to hire people not only based on their individual aptitude, values, skills and qualifications but also on whether they will fit into the company culture and organisational structure. Hiring someone who’s not right for the job may be detrimental to your overall productivity and may lead to a decline in motivation from other members of the team.
  • Develop career progression plans for your employees – Look at performance and potential to help with the development of a clear progress plan by preparing and communicating it with the employee.
  • Enhance employees’ wellbeing – create a safe and healthy workplace that provides security to your employees. People feel safe in situations that are more or less predictable and avoid working in environments where there is lack of trust, and the general outlook is unclear and inconsistent.
  • Listen to your staff – employees that are known to be heard are more likely to be engaged. As employers, it is essential to be seen to act on their feedback, even if it’s to explain the rationale behind a decision.

When engagement is present, the positive association between the employee and the organisation they work for will increase, together with the emotional connection between the two. In the next blog post, we will elaborate more on the means and ways how to implement employee engagement within the companies.

To learn more about practical ways on how you can better engage your employees and work towards achieving your business vision together get in touch via email at engagement@businessdoctors.com.mt or call us on 79 903 685 for a free consultation appointment.