How to Engage with Employees Post-Covid

The working world completely turned on its head last year, with most office workers being forced to work remotely or at least, to split their time between their home and office.

With businesses starting to return to some form of normality, the idea of working in a ‘normal’ way can feel strange to some employees. The way in which employers handled Covid can contribute to how engaged employees feel. If you kept in touch with them and looked after them during the pandemic, you are likely to have kept them engaged. If you didn’t, it will be more challenging, although not impossible to get them back on board.

With a Gallup survey revealing that employee engagement has declined from 22% to 20% in two years, how do you ensure you improve relations with your employees?

Continuous Feedback

How do you know how your employees are feeling if you fail to ask for feedback? There are many ways you can request feedback from employees, including employee engagement surveys and anonymous feedback tools such as 360° feedback.

Employee-driven feedback can help you to understand what your employees want, how they feel, and how you can improve their experience within your business. This can help increase retention levels, productivity, and the reputation of your business.

Feedback should not be given once a year during an annual appraisal, it should be a continuous process of understanding how your employees are feeling on any given day.

Wellbeing Initiatives

Providing employee wellbeing initiatives can be a good way to improve employee engagement. When you show you care about your employees, both physically and mentally, it will make them feel valued and less likely to want to jump ship!

It’s even more important to consider wellbeing initiatives post-Covid, as everyone has gone through an extremely difficult and challenging time. These may include, allowing flexible working, providing healthy snacks or lunches, introducing support for mental health, and providing free gym membership.

Improve Management Training

Research from the popular job site, Totaljobs, has revealed that a staggering 49% of employees left their job because of their line manager. The statistics suggest that managers are not dealing with their team in a way that is motivating and inspiring them, in fact, it is encouraging them to head for the nearest exit!

It is, therefore, the responsibility of businesses to ensure that their managers receive proper training, in order to improve employee engagement. It is also imperative to monitor feedback from surveys etc, to ensure that any issues with management are dealt with quickly before they become a reason for the employee to leave.

It is often the case that managers don’t really know how to deal with situations, and as a result, they fail to deal with them in the most conducive way. Management training can help inform and inspire them to do a better job.

Recognition

We all like to receive a bit of recognition here and there, even if it is a simple ‘thank you.’ It can go a long way to ensuring that employee relations are positive.

If employees are doing a good job, let them know and even go one step further by offering a reward for high performance. Employees want to feel valued, and recognition is a vital way to ensure this.

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At Thymometrics, we provide tools that help improve employee engagement. We can provide always-on surveys and feedback solutions to ensure that you are always engaging positively with your employees. Our simple tools will help empower employees and monitor wellbeing while also providing managers with useful insight.

For more information, please call 01223 750251, email hello@thymometrics.com or visit thymometrics.com.

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