Activating your company strategy to benefit employee engagement
Without the why, what's the point?
Everyone is claiming to know the secret formula to employee engagement everywhere you look. You can also gain the magic formula of the elusive, mythical, satisfied workforce for a small fee.
That is, of course, as long as you and your staff have hours of free time to measure the metrics and complete endless tick-box exercises to figure out what is happening in your team.
Then what happens to all that data that has been meticulously collected and collated?
Does the workforce ever see the results?
Do most companies have the time or inclination to share those findings?
Do they even discuss with their workforce why they are doing it?
Without the why, what's the point?
The only way of engaging employees is to get the team hands-on with the company strategy and vision. Many employees must believe in their role's true why to be genuinely engaged.
Bringing this to life enables employees to connect on a deeper level with the company's vision and strategy and how they are making a difference in their work.
It also allows workplaces to tap into an often-overlooked asset, front-line testers, working with your company's 'product' daily and spotting the issues long before they make it to the analyst's attention.
Those who get it right
Recently Collins Aerospace had an incredible evening being recognised for its commitment to employees during the Chartered Institute of Personal Development.
Not only did they win "Best Employee Voice Initiative" but they were highly commended in two other award categories, Best People Team and Best Hybrid and Flexible Working Initiative.
They managed this through a series of well-thought-out actions.
The company looked at how they communicated on all levels across their facility and realised that improvements could be made.
As a result, they established several forums, surveys, and employee engagement events to allow employees to voice their opinions.
Taking this approach further could open so many doors for the company, and they will use their employees' voices at events to gain insights and ideas into the business.
They could even use events to help make strategic decisions in the business by learning from what is happening daily.
New-gen workers are asking for more.
And rightly so, retaining employees is more critical than ever with businesses facing workforce shortages and inflation, not to mention the rapid changes to the economy that are facing the country.
It's no longer enough to write down buzzwords in a job description.
Employees know their own leverage and expect to be treated as such.
HR must treat employees like customers, winning them over and making them stay.
If this is happening, then now is the perfect time to use ideas from how companies communicate with their customers, such as using brand activations and putting them into the internal communication strategy.
What companies could learn from brand activations
Brand activations tend to be hands-on or creatively driven marketing campaigns.
A well-thought-out activation reaches the right audience at the right time and gets people talking about the brand. Now, if the brand is your company, and the people enthusiastically talking about it are your employees, they can feel involved and proud to be part of the bigger picture.
Paramount's brand activation
This is exactly what we did for Paramount.
To help them launch their sustainability strategy, we had to think of a way to excite, inform and inspire their employees and get them talking about making a change to help save our planet.
We designed and built a bespoke cardboard set to support the launch, which could be used for dual purposes.
They have used the set for their town hall broadcast, which will be used as an evolving installation.
For 10 days, the props and printed content on the set will change to reflect a different pillar related to sustainability. To engage and inform employees of what is happening to the planet they live on whilst providing necessary steps to be taken as a company and personally to make a difference.
Ultimately allowing employees to have a say in what happens at their workplace, involving them in improvements and, most importantly, understanding why their company needs them is how you get good at employee engagement.
