Employee engagement is key to a company’s productivity as engaged workers are usually the most productive workers. In addition, they tie their personal achievements with their companies’ success, so they are more invested in the success of the business and are more likely to stay.   

What’s causing the Great Resignation?

According to a recent Gallup study, engaged workers are 30% less likely to seek new employment; the number jumped to 74% for actively disengaged workers in 2021. It reported that only 36% of US employees are currently engaged in their work and workplace. It is not difficult to see why ‘The Great Resignation’ or ‘The Big Quit’ is happening now following the pandemic’s impact on people’s life situations and priorities.

“Productivity and engagement are two sides of the same coin,” HR and business leadership expert Josh Bersin said at Enboarder EDGE 2020, a virtual event held last year. “You don’t make people happy and then expect them to perform. It’s the other way around. You give them a situation […] where they can perform well, and then they become happy”.

Distanced but not disengaged

With more employees working remotely or choosing to have a hybrid work-office mix, the workforce is becoming distributed, so individuals are distanced from each other. Employers must be more aware and empathetic of their employees to prevent disengagement from arising. Before designing a strategy that aligns talent optimization with business priorities, they must first know what’s going on with their people. It needs to be easy for people to get in touch and have a safe space to share their concerns promptly. Fortunately, there are tools available that allow organizations to connect, communicate and orchestrate people better to craft a more human-centric culture and strategy, such as Enboarder. 

“When your company has an interruption, or your business unit, or your team or your project, your most important skill is in enabling the people, the team, the organization itself to pull you out of that problem,” Bersin said during his Enboarder EDGE 2020 session. “You can’t do it yourself as an HR person or a leader – we have to allow other people to do that with us. And that’s why employee experience is so important.”

Enboarder EDGE 2021 

Enboarder was established in 2015 and now counts over 360 customers, including Shopify, McDonald’s, Cisco Meraki, Scentre Group, EA Games, Canva, and LVMH. The platform has gone beyond being used for onboarding — more than 40% of its customers deploy it for other uses, like ensuring Covid-19 measures are communicated, arranging parental leave, and reboarding returning employees.

This month, Enboarder EDGE 2021 gathers more Experience-Driven Geniuses to share their insights on harnessing the power of human connections for business success. In addition, the free three-episode streaming experience will be launching the People Activation Revolution – an entirely new way to think about how we work in a reality where remote and hybrid work is the new normal. Episode 1 of EDGE 2021 goes live on 19 October. Register and check out the viewing time for your region here.

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The irony for decision-makers is that employees are any company’s biggest investment and greatest asset, yet they remain one of its highest costs. A new piece of IT hardware procured at great expense wouldn’t be mistreated as a matter of course from the day it arrived. For some, doing the same with people appears to be OK.

Of course it’s all entirely avoidable, and study after study shows that positive, happy employees perform at their very best, day in, day out, for (literally) a lifetime, given half a chance. Conversely, getting it wrong can wreck the business’s chances at the success that most seek.

Starting Early

Like comparing options from multiple retailers before a big purchase, research and investment starts early with new employees. Vetting applicants and interviewing candidates takes time and money, plus there are plenty of other elements to get into place. Training and mentoring, for example, must be planned from a purely operational perspective, plus there are the pastoral elements too — introductions, tours of the premises, a managed settling in process for the new arrivals — in all, it’s a great deal to consider.

Certain parts of that process have evolved a great deal over the last few years. There are obvious changes in work patterns (remote vs on-premises), but even before the COVID pandemic, technology had begun to alter pre-onboarding, onboarding itself and ongoing development, too.

Some IT-related changes have come from the adoption by organisations of digital processes, like digital signing and witnessing of contracts, for example. But the overall experience of a new employee is much influenced by the ubiquity of technology in everyday life.

A prime example of this natural tendency towards the digital might be a young employee given an A4 arch folder comprising a “welcome pack.” To a digital native raised in the smartphone era, that’s not the best experience, nor is it a particularly promising start to a new career.

Hybrid onboarding

The cultural shift in society outside the workplace needs to be reflected in the workplace. Therefore, using technology platforms to onboard new staff seems appropriate, and it’s certainly highly relevant at a time in the evolution of work where the lines between home and office are blurring.

Technology delivering onboarding digitally serves the purpose of encompassing both traditional “welcome to the office” and the newer “wave hello at the camera to your new colleagues” onboarding scenarios.

There’s a great deal more on offer from onboarding technologies than substituting the traditional welcome handshake for a digital equivalent. The same platforms can be used to deliver engaging, exciting mentoring and help via rich, experiential media, for example. Plus, multiple collaboration tools at the fingertips of the new starter and their colleagues can start friendships, build bonds, and start the new hire on the right course faster and with less need for managerial oversight.

There’s little need to train new hires in the physical workings of digital platforms, if the creators of the onboarding suites stick to the norms of interface design that are an everyday part of life. That leaves the field clear to have a software platform that makes immediate and positive connections between the newbie, the organisation and the people in it.

Done well, those connections develop, building excitement for the new career — irrespective of whether the process is all online, all in-person, or some of each.

Not just the money

The big technology companies know well that the very best employees are looking for more than a high salary. That’s why companies like Apple and Google work so hard (and spend so big) on exciting campuses, employee environments and everyday perks of the job. Candidates of the Microsoft caliber pick and choose an employer based on the working experience.

The lessons other organisations and sectors can learn are apparent. Starting off and developing new hires needs to be positive, engaging, and exciting. Just a decade ago, achieving this via technology for remote or hybrid workforces was impractical. But in 2021, technology can not only deliver great onboarding experiences but add more to the processes than its traditional elements ever could.

Staff who are brought into the company smoothly and who are quickly up to speed and comfortable in their surroundings will outperform those left standing at the (real or virtual) threshold, wondering what to do next. Getting onboarding right isn’t especially difficult, considering suppliers of dedicated platforms offer experiential onboarding systems right now.

Engaging early in the new employee’s progress into the organisation and keeping up the positive, helpful, and broad-reaching support will create a body of workers who will do well by their employer. Every employee deserves more than a workplace that is just good enough not to complain about. With systems like that from Enboarder, organisations can make a difference in their people’s lives and an extraordinary difference to the bottom line too.

The post Getting the Basics Right: Onboarding Done Right in the Hybrid Workplace appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.