It’s no secret that having engaged employees can make a big difference for your company culture and your bottom line.
For every disengaged employee, it costs businesses an additional 1/3 of their paycheck. Unfortunately, 85% of employees are disengaged at work, meaning that businesses are paying a lot more than they should be for their workforce and getting a lower ROI per employee.
How do you fix that?
One way is by leveraging personalization in your employee experience. This can help you tap into employees’ internal motivations, improving engagement and productivity.
Let’s look at some ways you can use personalization to help you on the path to more engaged employees:
Use several communication methods
During the pandemic, only half of businesses offered personalized internal communication options. Which means that a lot of the internal messaging happening would’ve come via word-of-mouth or may not have reached people at all.
We all digest information in different ways, and internal communications are no different.
Most businesses have their preferred ways of communicating. Technology makes it easier than ever to combine options to suit both organizations and employees.
For instance, meeting tools now have auto-transcripts. These closed captions aren’t perfect—and are far better with some accents than others, as my English accent knows all too well—but they make it easier for employees with auditory processing issues, or who are hard of hearing, to understand what’s happening and not feel left out.
Tools like these can also create agendas or notes at the end of meetings, meaning everyone can see what the key topics and takeaways are.
Video tools, meanwhile, now have auto-transcripts or allow time-poor employees to increase the speed to get through them faster.
There are so many options now that you don’t need to stick to one form of communication and risk leaving employees out. You want everyone to feel in the loop when you’re aiming for more engaged employees.
Support different ways of learning
77% of L&D professionals believe learning is imperative to employee engagement.
But everyone learns in different ways.
Some people might favor an intensive, all-day workshop, while others may prefer something that’s self-paced.
One of the fascinating things about being human is how differently we all learn.
But just like with school, businesses can prioritize one type of learning over others, meaning that some get to excel while others fall behind purely because their brain works in a different way from what’s treated as “normal.”
When you offer employees different ways to learn skills or process information, it shows you see them as individuals. That you’re not going to hold their short attention spans, desire to tackle one task at a time, or fact that they learn in a different way from their colleagues, against them.
It also means any training you offer comes with a higher ROI because employees will stay, and therefore use, more of what they’ve learned. So your business benefits so much more.
Regardless of how an employee learns, they—and your business—still get all the benefits that come from learning. The only difference is that there are several paths they can take to learning that new skill. And you get more out of them, and more engaged employees, as a result.
Provide multiple career development options
Just like everyone learns differently, not every employee will take the same path to promotion, either. Some people might want to be managers in the future, while others would rather be your subject matter experts instead. That doesn’t make those employees who don’t want to manage people less beneficial to your business.
Some employees may feel that their only path to a promotion or a pay raise is to go into a people management role when it isn’t the right fit for them.
This can cause stress and disengagement among your managers and employees, with poor management being one of the main reasons employees leave their roles.
So what can you do instead?
The more options you give your team members, the more supported they’ll feel. And the more likely you’ll be to have engaged employees.
Some options include:
- Changing departments, like going from marketing to sales
- Moving to working on commission or increasing commission rates
- Taking on a people management role
- Becoming a knowledge leader, like a principal engineer
These are all different paths to career development, taking a more personal approach than the typical assumption that the only way to grow in a career is to stop honing technical skills and move into honing people skills.
Some people just aren’t cut out for traditional management, or don’t want to do it. That doesn’t mean they’re not great employees. Or that they’re not engaged employess. Embracing different types of workers and career growth will help with employee engagement, internal knowledge, and retention.
Don’t assume all benefits appeal to everyone
Different benefits appeal to different employees. A child-free person isn’t going to find subsidized childcare appealing, for example, but for a parent—especially in a country where childcare is expensive—this could be a key selling point.
Likewise, a healthcare plan is less appealing in a country that has free or subsidized healthcare.
For a long time, businesses have taken a one-size-fits-all approach to benefits. This treats every employee the same, rather than considering individuals’ life experiences and needs.
Rather than making assumptions or following trends, why not ask your employees what benefits they want?
You can send your employees a survey to find out what benefits appeal to them. This shows them that their opinions matter to you, and that you’re listening. If you want more engaged employees, listening to them, and acting on what they say, is key.
Conclusion
With the rise of technology and AI, there are fewer excuses than ever not to offer your employees more personalized experiences.
Technology can help you repurpose information in multiple ways, collect employee sentiment, and analyze the results.
If you want to personalize your employee experience in pursuit of more engaged employees, Workrowd has the tools you need.
From personalizable dashboards so every team member can quickly access the information that’s most important to them, to automated feedback surveys so you always know how to improve, it’s all just a click away.
Ready to see how we can help you create more engaged employees without the stress? Visit us online today, or send us a note directly at hello@workrowd.com.
