In a proactive sense, employee engagement may start right at the moment when a candidate begins to search your website or practically comes down to your facility to drop a CV. However, to date, to my understanding Employee engagement begins right from the moment a potential candidate becomes your employee, i.e. an offer letter is issued to her. An analogy here is that parents start loving their children right from the day they have conceived. And this goes for an employee as well. People being assets of the company, must be loved and engaged from the moment they come to join your umbilical cord.
Engagement must empower them and not feel like a mundane task of being overloaded with unnecessary and for-the-heck-like tasks. Engaging employees meaningfully can reap fruitful results which can be more beneficial than ever thought of. A few of many benefits are that mind-wandering stops and focus increases.
And coming from the world of emotions, I can vouch for this to be a great state for the learning of employees and mutual growth of the organization and them.
Challenge motivates many, but threat withers away the happiness and engagement so this fact must be taken care of.
Employee engagement is a subset of Learning & development. Referring to Mcclelland Theory of need which has a need for achievement, power, and affiliation as motivation for an individual, I would say that L&D has a vital role in fulfilling the need for achievement of an individual As through L&D an employee can be intellectually and emotionally engaged in upgrading herself or improving upon herself. Various ways can be sponsoring higher studies or next level training in a domain or behavioral add to skill training. Also, coaching can be a way to work on improvement areas of an employee. And Employee engagement for an employee who is still to join your company can begin in form of literature on organizational culture being sent to her, gamification around organizational values and KRAs, KPIs of individual. Also, telecommuting meets can be held if the time gap is more than a month or so.
An employee should always be motivated to have open communication and nothing can beat the rapport that is built thereafter. Employees should feel like being in an extended family, second home, and not in a 9-5 environment. Though in this Pandemic 9-5 is a passe.
L&D needs more agility as the stress and reasons for stress also have changed now. L&D also needs to manage the mental health and well-being of employees and this is a new trend of engagement now. L&D can work with the Wheel of Life approach and check where is the satisfaction level of the employee not giving her happiness, and can suggest ways and means to the employee for increasing satisfaction in the spoke she wants to.
I would say the job of L&D has increased manifold, but engaging employees is an exciting task that L&D looks after.
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Author / Educator – Dr. Anju Chawla, Author, Coach, Speaker, Emotional Intelligence Solopreneur
Solopreneur by Choice and Curious by nature. Anju is a holistic offering for Emotional Intelligence. She is an internationally certified EI coach. Her belief is – if one can be aware of their emotions, then to win over the Emotional state becomes possible. She enables high potential leaders befriend their emotions to transcend. She is on a mission to spread Emotional literacy with an eye to equipping people manage their emotional state and develop an effective relationships.
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