Employee Engagement – People

Get employee engagement wrong and you’ll find employee retention is low, nobody can remember the company values - or even cares what they are, and the office atmosphere feels negative and unproductive.

Get employee engagement right and you should have a committed, enthusiastic workforce who speak highly of your organisation and its values and want to contribute to its success; you should have good staff communication, a high level of individual wellbeing resulting in less absenteeism, and a high rate of employee attraction and retention.

But is this easier said than done? There are more generations alive today than at any point in history - which means a far more diverse workforce with differing wellbeing priorities and a varied employee experience. What we value as a society is also growing and changing – workplace wellbeing is increasingly influenced by how flexible an employer is prepared to be: employees not only expect offices to be great places to work, but may expect to work from home too, or at a co-working hub. Research certainly shows that people perform best when they have different settings for different types of work- most people would agree that wellbeing and performance won’t be tip-top when sitting at an office desk all day.

So what can you do?

There are numerous ways you can improve employee engagement. Firstly, make sure your leadership team is fully engaged, committed to good staff communication and constantly monitoring team dynamics. 

Secondly, ensure you have a strong organisational brand or personality with a clear purpose, linked to leadership vision and mission. Ensure this brand is recognised and reflected by employees in their day-to-day performance. You’ll probably need to spend time and money identifying your brand purpose, articulating your values and establishing the personality of your brand. Then examine carefully how your brand is supporting, inspiring and engaging employees - have you asked them what they think? What do your employees believe the brand stands for, and why are they prepared to put the hours into it?

Encourage workplace wellbeing. This is not simply a case of supplying a fruit bowl or a beanbag breakout area. It means designing a creative and considered working environment which endorses your brand values and purpose and provides the right variety of settings to give groups and individuals the optimum employee experience, thus generating their best work. If you have a relocation, refurbishment or organisational merger coming up even better: seize the moment to refocus everyone in the business and make the redesign of the working environment an effective part of the change management process.

Finally, establish a mechanism to measure staff satisfaction against purpose and bottom line fulfilment. You need to be able to prove it’s all working.

How can we help?

At RAW Brothers we can help bring real creativity to employee engagement. We are big believers in the right design of the working environment having a huge impact on employee experience, workplace wellbeing and organisational performance. 

We want to create great places to work that are authentic, flexible and connected to the vision and values of a business. We’ll help you ensure that your physical space and the people inside it is are a living, breathing embodiment of your brand purpose. We bring together your brand teams, property people and HR department, working with them all to create a united experience which everyone has bought into. 

Whether you have one large office or the challenge of uniting people across multiple locations, we have extensive expertise in uniting organisational personality to people and the places they work. We’ll make sure employee engagement becomes less of an onerous catchword and more of a creative and highly productive process for your organisation.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us

Winston Churchill