Engaging Employees With an Organizational Mission
This article is from RISQ Consulting’s Zywave client portal, a resource available to all RISQ Consulting clients. Please contact your Benefits Consultant or Account Executive for more information or for help setting up your own login.
Organizations thrive through a sense of belonging and shared purpose. As employers navigate on-site, hybrid and remote work models, many may worry that those critical success factors could get lost in the workplace. Luckily, there are still ways for employers to promote their organizational mission with all employees, regardless of location. In times when employers may struggle to find and keep the workers they need, a strong and authentic organizational mission can help attract and retain top talent. Workers are more likely to be engaged and loyal to organizations with a mission they believe in and trust.
This article explores opportunities for employers to engage and unite their employees in both on-site and distributed workplaces.
A Mission Everyone Believes
According to Indeed.com, an organizational mission—or a mission statement—is a brief, broad statement about a company’s goals and how it intends to meet them. It can address what the organization offers and how it hopes to serve its customers, community, employees, investors or other key stakeholders. Strong missions develop a human connection or an idea or behavior that employees can get behind and truly believe.
Cultural values are a way for the organization to achieve its mission. They define employee behavioral expectations and explain how leadership expects employees to work. Ultimately, everyone is working toward the same goal and demonstrating the values and behaviors aligned with and expected from the organization.
Connecting with Employees
It’s much easier to implement an employee engagement plan with a solid understanding of the organizational mission. Employers should consider the following tips to promote an organizational mission while keeping all employees engaged and firmly believing in the company:
- Involve employees early. The sooner organizations get the mission in front of employees, the sooner employees see how their role impacts the mission. The organizational mission and other company information are critical components of the onboarding process. This step reinforces that employees’ work does matter.
- Celebrate and communicate wins. Whether big or small, celebrating any organizational success that upholds the mission and delivers value to stakeholders not only reminds employees about how performance is measured, but demonstrates that those actions are important and truly make a difference.
- Reward behaviors that support company goals. Recognizing and rewarding employees who contribute to the progress and achievement of company goals is crucial. For example, encourage employees to share insight about what the mission means to them and how they live it. This can help provide concrete examples for other employees and demonstrate that the organization truly believes in and strives for that behavior or mindset. Recognition in a public format ensures that all employees are aware of the star behavior, which now comes to life in the workday.
- Foster belonging in the workplace. Many factors can contribute to employees’ sense of belonging in the workplace; however, a critical element revolves around whether employees are proud of their employer’s mission or purpose. When aligned with the mission, employees are often proud of their work and the organization.
- Continue organizational traditions. Everything that once drove formal and informal culture in the physical workplace needs to be reformatted to ensure inclusivity and connection between the physical and virtual workforces. This includes team-building activities, wellness initiatives, milestone celebrations and companywide events that allow employees to preserve or strengthen social attachments.
- Establish informal and formal engagement opportunities. Employers can encourage team leaders to create formal stand-up or check-in meetings to keep the team regularly connected. It’s equally important to support informal opportunities such as mentorship, walking meetings and coffee breaks. It’s all about encouraging and, to a certain extent, facilitating communication among employees.
- Drive employees to an intranet or other shared platform. It’s critical that all employees have access to the latest company happenings. For example, a company intranet can become a one-stop destination for employees to get to know each other and communicate. When there’s a designated destination for all updates, all employees receive the same information at the same time, and there’s no advantage of being on-site or remote. Additionally, communication apps and channels can serve as engaging employee channels and provide a shared platform for employees to stay in touch.
Lastly, employers should be intentional about communication by ensuring there’s a communication plan in place or, at a minimum, establishing guidelines about how the organization communicates and how frequently. Communication formats and other employee preferences should be taken into consideration to make sure organizational information and updates resonate with and engage the entire workforce.
If working situations have changed, it may be helpful for employers to ask employees about current challenges and opportunities for living out company values, whether formally through a survey or informally during department meetings. A baseline survey can help organizations identify disparities between the company’s mission and values and how employees actually feel about the company and workplace, and ultimately address such issues.
Summary
In a distributed work environment, the in-person work culture typically dominates, which could isolate employees working remotely full- or part-time. That means it’s imperative for employers to prioritize employee engagement in workplace strategies. Contact us today for more information on distributed workplace strategy and management.
- Published in Blog
Understanding the “Quiet Quitting” Trend
This article is from RISQ Consulting’s Zywave client portal, a resource available to all RISQ Consulting clients. Please contact your Benefits Consultant or Account Executive for more information or for help setting up your own login.
“Quiet quitting” is an emerging trend where workers only do what their job description entails without going above and beyond. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees shifted their views on their work lives, and this has been reflected in movements such as the Great Reshuffle—a mass movement of workers to jobs that meet their demands for things such as more flexibility and better benefits—the shift to remote work and, now, the quiet quitting trend.
Employees who solely complete their job description and no more could continue to be valuable workers. However, employers can consider steps to engage employees and prevent quiet quitting from happening in the first place. To help eliminate the trend’s presence in their organizations, employers should focus on effective communication with their employees and methods to enhance employee engagement.
Signs of Quiet Quitting
Research conducted by Gallup found that only 32% of employees are engaged, and 17% are actively disengaged. Employees who are not engaged could be at risk for doing only their job and not going above and beyond. Further, 53% of workers reported they feel burnt out, according to Talkspace’s Employee Stress Check 2022 Report. To improve employee engagement and prevent these issues from turning from quiet quitting into actual quitting, employers need to know what signs to look for. Employers should pay attention to employees who are consistently doing the following:
- Not attending meetings that are not mandatory
- Not being as productive as they once were
- Contributing to team projects less
- Not participating in meetings
- Displaying a lack of enthusiasm
It is important to know that there a several reasons an employee may choose to quiet quit. For example, they may simply refuse to do work outside their job description because they feel they are not being compensated for it. While it may not be clear why an employee is choosing to quiet quit, these signs are a good indicator that an employee may be thinking about it or trying to do so.
What Employers Can Do
Quiet quitting is often the result of decreased motivation and burnout. Further, a lack of effective communication between leaders and employees and a general failure of management and organizations can play a role. For example, failures may include a lack of honesty with employees and not delivering on promises. Consider the following ideas to help improve employee engagement and decrease the odds of quiet quitting among employees:
- Provide clear job descriptions. Job descriptions let employees know exactly what is expected of them. Employers should review job descriptions to ensure they accurately reflect the duties they expect their employees to perform.
- Conduct performance reviews. Performance reviews are opportunities to reward employees for the positive things they have done and inspire them to continue working hard. Without this feedback and indications of appreciation for hard work, such as title adjustments and salary raises, employees could lack motivation and start to feel burnt out and consider quiet quitting. Further, it is important to recognize employees who go above and beyond because they are likely to feel discouraged and decrease their performance if their contributions go unnoticed. Conversely, performance reviews are just as important for underperforming employees because they are opportunities to clearly communicate expectations and work together to correct the behavior.
- Educate employees on employee handbooks. Employee handbooks are another tool employers can use to clearly communicate expectations to employees, but they are only truly effective if employees understand them. Employers should take time to educate employees on their handbook and its policies so they can ensure employee understanding. The handbook should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure that expectations are up to date and that organizations are in compliance with current laws.
- Provide learning and development opportunities. High employee engagement is crucial to preventing quiet quitting. One effective way to increase engagement is through learning and development initiatives. According to Zywave’s 2022 Attraction and Retention Benchmarking Overview, 29% of employers found career development opportunities to be a top priority of workers during the hiring process. Employees who have these opportunities are more likely to remain engaged and stay motivated to try their best at their jobs.
- Focus on good management strategies. Effective management is essential to having efficient, happy employees, so it is important to focus on the techniques managers use. Provide resources to managers about effective strategies and meet with them to discuss ways they can improve. Further, consider conducting skip reviews, where employees talk with their manager’s manager to discuss feedback or concerns they may have. This will allow the manager to receive helpful feedback that can be mutually beneficial and improve their employees’ experiences.
Takeaway
Quiet quitting is the new term for the trend of employees doing only what their job requires without exceeding expectations. Employers should be aware of the trend and that it will impact every workplace differently. Employers should monitor for signs that employees may be disengaging and utilize different strategies to help prevent quiet quitting. In cases where quiet quitting may be negatively impacting the employer and they cannot seem to resolve the issue, employers should ensure compliance with federal and local employment laws before pursuing any termination action. For specific guidance about disciplining employees, employers are encouraged to seek local legal counsel.
Contact RISQ Consulting today for more information on workplace trends, employee retention and employment laws.
- Published in Blog
RISQ Company Book Club “The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream”
By Ashley Snodgrass, Employee Benefits Analyst
The RISQ Consulting Team has been proud to sponsor a company book club for the last few years. Our book club has led to many insightful discussions about client experience, productivity, effective meeting structure, team dynamics, leadership and more. Some of these ideas have even led to tangible and beneficial changes in our organization.
Most recently, our team read The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream by Amy Webb. Amy Webb is a noted Futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute. Webb works to help companies and individuals understand how to interpret signals as information that can be used in planning for the future. According to the Future Today Institute (FTI) website, FTI works with companies to prepare leaders for “deep uncertainty and complex futures”. Amy Webb wrote The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream to bring futurist thinking to a wider audience.
In this book, Webb illustrates a multi-step process in which the reader can test patterns in societal behavior to determine which are more likely to turn into trends or stick long-term, as well as offer insight on how to think like a futurist. Webb also includes helpful graphics and supplemental resources to allow the reader to implement this process in their own organization.
The purpose of reading this book as a team was to encourage discussions about innovation. After reading, members of the book club met and discussed how varying technologies will impact our industry. We also discussed how we can leverage the NEW to benefit our clients and their employees. This resulted in RISQ creating a more robust and tech-forward employee communications package, which has become a high value service to our clients.
You may not be able to adopt all of the great ideas stored between the pages of a book club book, but when you share the experience of reading you are guaranteed to have at least one great outcome; it builds better comradery. And building better comradery is one positive trend that I know will stick around long-term.
As a reminder, if you want to start a book club in your own organization, I recommend checking out this post – for more tips to a successful start. Happy Reading!
- Published in Blog
