Employee Engagement Archives - The Future of Work Exchange

Spin for the Win with Gamification

Business Leadership General Insights HR Technology and Innovation by John Yuva on 11/21/2024

In an article on the Future of Work Exchange last week, we discussed digital credentials and badges as a means to recruit, verify, and retain talent. This week we’re exploring those concepts further through gamification in the workplace and how the Future of Work can be transformed by its utilization.

Gamification Defined

Gamification is defined by Investopedia as, “the incentivization of people’s engagement in non-game contexts and activities by using game-style mechanics.” First coined in 2002 by game designer Nick Pelling while incorporating game elements into ATM and vending machines, gamification became mainstream by 2009 and has only grown as a strategic approach in HR and business.

With employee engagement and productivity a high priority for enterprises, gamification bridges the employee experience with enterprise needs. It can turn mundane tasks and processes, such as training and upskilling, reviewing corporate and HR policies, rolling out new products and services, and even applying for a job within the organization into engaging activities.

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Employee Engagement Still Lacks Execution

Business Leadership Contingent Workforce General Insights HR Technology and Innovation by Christopher J. Dwyer on 11/20/2024

Today’s enterprises can be characterized as fast-paced, ever-evolving to effectively respond to a more dynamic marketplace. Within the hustle and bustle lies a critical workforce need that is often overlooked: employee engagement. The concept can be confused with simply offering employees certain monthly perks identified from a quick survey. However, it goes much deeper than that and reaches beyond permanent, full-time employees to those in the extended workforce, as well.

A well-rounded definition of employee engagement comes from Engage For Success: “Employee engagement is a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organization to give of their best each day, committed to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being.”

Powerful, Yet Underutilized

It is that commitment toward oneself and the enterprise that makes employee engagement such a powerful workforce approach. Yet, as a Gallup survey indicates, only 36% of U.S. employees are engaged in their work and workplace. The number is even lower on a global scale, with only 20% of employees engaged at work.

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Learning from the Past to Build the Workplace Cultures of the Future

Business Leadership Diversity and Inclusion Talent Acquisition by Christopher J. Dwyer on 10/30/2024

I can’t help but be a person that is incredibly nostalgic. As the holiday season approaches, I frequently think of my childhood days and the experiences that shaped me and made me the person I am today. While my memories at this time of year are appropriately focused on trick-or-treating in suburban Massachusetts as a youth, there are also memories that are more, let’s say…business-focused.

I’m lucky enough to have spent the past 18 years of my career at two firms (nearly 12 years with the famous Ardent Partners, the research parent of the Future of Work Exchange), however, before my foray into the world of human capital technology, the Future of Work movement, and talent management and technology research, I spent some time at companies with not-so-empathic leaders.

For example:

A VP who told me that it wasn’t okay to say “How’s it going?” to another person if I hadn’t met them yet.
A company owner who said that if I ever got tired, I wasn’t fit for a career in writing. (Let me know if you know someone that has never been or will never be tired…)
Another company owner (same company, different owner) who said I had a “defeatist attitude” when I told him that I didn’t feel appreciated or valued enough after working 80+ hour weeks for a straight month after two employees quit.
A CEO who said, after finding a single (one!) spelling error in a document that I produced (that totaled over 40 pages), that I needed to spend more time focusing and less time “theorizing” when writing, and;
A certain company owner (twice on this list!) that told me that I “would never find anything out there” when I resigned and gave my two weeks’ notice.

The specific examples above all link back to one key element: a terrible workplace culture. Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research has discovered that, over the past 12 months, 72% of businesses have taken steps to enhance workplace culture to better foster collaboration, engagement, diversity, and innovation.

Workplace culture isn’t just a nebulous concept anymore, but rather a true Future of Work state that affects talent acquisition, talent attraction, hiring success, brand awareness, and talent sustainability.

For too many years, I focused on those negative experiences, as well as my own professional mistakes. Sometimes they drove me to be better. Sometimes they hindered my progress. And, sometimes, they affected my mental health.

The mistakes and failures of the past, especially those stemming from poor leadership, can serve as invaluable lessons to shape the workplace cultures we strive for today. Rather than allowing past missteps to hold us back, we should use them to catalyze meaningful, positive change. Two years ago, ten years ago, or even twenty years in the past – the ideal workplace cultures we envision today should be informed by what we wish we had experienced back then. Reflecting on the shortcomings, pain points, and dissatisfactions of the past equips us to actively create the thriving, employee-centric environments we want to see now.

In today’s globalized, competitive business landscape, workplace culture has become a critical component of success. Elements like worker wellbeing, mental health support, employee experience, and overall company happiness are no longer optional – they are essential for retaining top talent, fostering innovation, and driving enterprise-wide prosperity.

Organizations that prioritize cultivating positive, enriching workplace cultures will be best positioned to thrive. By learning from past mistakes and intentionally shaping workplace cultures aligned with employee needs and values, companies can gain a competitive edge in attracting, developing, and retaining the best people.

The key is to let the lessons of the past propel us towards a better future, rather than allowing them to hold us back. With this mindset, the missteps of yesterday can become the catalysts for the workplace cultures of tomorrow.

Employee Experience and the Power of Engagement

Business Leadership Diversity and Inclusion General Insights HR Talent by John Yuva on 08/05/2024

One business constant over the last four years is uncertainty. Whether it’s the economy, geopolitics, or the overall market, enterprises must contend with that sense of the unknown. As such, having a flexible and agile workforce is essential when market dynamics shift. Flexibility and agility often derive from employee experience (EX) initiatives. Organizations that prioritize employee experience are more internally aligned and can better pivot when needs arise.

However, essential to employee experience is understanding that it goes beyond employee satisfaction. Rather, it is a strategic imperative that directly influences organizational culture, success, and the ability to navigate an ever-changing business landscape.

Employee Experience Begins and Ends with Engagement

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Voices Behind Quiet and Loud Quitters

Business Leadership General Insights HR Talent Uncategorized by John Yuva on 09/11/2023

One of the main tenets of the Future of Work is employee engagement. It sets the tone for how to motivate, influence, and inspire workers to embrace their work and the culture of the enterprise. Since 2022 when the workplace began to normalize after two tumultuous years of the pandemic, employee engagement has become a cornerstone to achieving a productive and competitive organization.

What is the result when a lack of employee engagement exists? Two employee behaviors — “quiet quitting” and “loud quitting” — become prevalent. Current workforce statistics indicate that disengagement is more prominent than management probably realizes.

Quiet Quitting Proliferates

In early 2022, a term emerged describing workers who are disengaged from the workplace and generally apply the minimal amount of work necessary to complete their job — quiet quitters. When compared to the overall workforce, quiet quitters represent the majority of workers today, with most struggling with stress and burnout.

According to Gallup’s State of the Workplace 2023 report, 52% of US/Canadian workplace employees fall within the “disengaged” (quiet quitter) category. It also represents the largest group that HR and business managers can actively engage with positive results by listening to employee concerns and issues.

What changes are quiet quitters most looking for to thrive in the workplace?

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Optimize Your Workforce with Recession-Proof Strategies, Part Three

Business Leadership Contingent Workforce Diversity and Inclusion General Insights HR Talent Technology and Innovation Uncategorized by John Yuva on 08/14/2023

Today concludes our three-part series exploring several contingent and workforce strategies to achieve a recession-proof enterprise.

We’re now two months into the second half of 2023 and economically speaking, things are looking positive. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that GDP grew 2.4% in the second quarter of 2023. The labor market remains tight with unemployment at 3.6%, a rate not witnessed in decades. However, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the tight labor market provides the Federal Reserve with the flexibility to continue raising interest rates to fight inflation. Currently, inflation rests at 3%, a percentage point higher than the Federal Reserve’s longer-run goal of 2%.

Does the state of the current U.S. economy equate to a “soft landing” and the evasion of a recession? Maybe, maybe not.

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How Are Businesses Enhancing the Employee Experience?

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 04/19/2023

It’s all about the “experience” today. All aspects of the modern-day workforce, including both FTEs and contingent workers, revolve around the day-to-day (and long-term) experience within a workplace setting. Business leaders cannot rely on archaic modalities of management any longer if they want their workers to be happy, satisfied, and, most importantly, productive. In the latest edition of the Future of Work Exchange‘s exclusive infographic series, How Are Businesses Enhancing the Employee Experience?, we unveil some new research findings on how business leaders plan to improve their employee engagement and employee experience initiatives.

Remote Work and Employee Engagement Are Inherently Linked

Business Leadership Talent by Christopher J. Dwyer on 03/06/2023

It seems that everywhere we turn, there are new return-to-office (RTO) mandates making headlines. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, recently mandated employees return to the office three days a week beginning in the spring. The same day of the mandate, over 14,000 employees joined a newly-created Slack channel to voice their displeasure with the ruling.

Disney’s executives followed a similar path, only much earlier in January, and, with four mandated days-in-office rather than the three dictated by Amazon. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff mandated three days in office in the midst of the company sunsetting its Future Forum consortium, which, SOMETHING enough, found that flexible working environment were incredibly conducive to productivity and employee engagement.

And, yeah, we all know Elon Musk’s feelings on remote work during his tumultuous time thus far at Twitter. There’s also this nugget from a recent Fortune article:

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Unconscious Bias Restrains DE&I Efforts

Business Leadership Diversity and Inclusion General Insights HR by John Yuva on 02/13/2023

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) is widely regarded as a critical component of a Future of Work vision. It is an important initiative for enterprise and employee unification, engagement, and inclusion for workers of all backgrounds and demographics. Despite those positive intents, DE&I is under greater scrutiny from local and state governments that view such programs as part of a “woke” agenda. However, understanding its value and reward, enterprises across the U.S. continue to foster DE&I principles and integrate them into their recruitment and workforce engagement strategies.

With the current political and social polarization that exists, HR and managers must maintain the momentum of DE&I and further drive its criticality within the organization. Two areas that are extremely relevant today are unconscious bias and employee resource groups. The intent of addressing these two areas is to bring greater awareness to our own biases while recognizing the needs underserved employees in the enterprise who may be impacted by unconscious bias themselves.

Address Unconscious Bias

The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) defines this concept as “Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness. Everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups, and these biases stem from one’s tendency to organize social worlds by categorizing.”

One interesting aspect of unconscious bias that UCSF points out is that it’s “…far more prevalent than conscious prejudice and often incompatible with one’s conscious values.” This is an important statement for HR and managers because it means with engagement, employees can better recognize and quell unconscious bias in their own interactions.

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Employee Engagement Still Lacks Execution

Business Leadership Contingent Workforce General Insights HR Technology and Innovation by John Yuva on 12/26/2022

Powerful, Yet Underutilized

However, for those enterprises with a fully entrenched employee engagement system, the results speak for themselves. According to Gallup, those leading organizations are experiencing the following benefits:

An increase of 18% in productivity (sales)
An increase of 23% in profitability
A decline of 40% in quality issues (defects)

Achieving these results requires engagement with every worker. With nearly half (nearly 48%) of today’s enterprises comprised of contingent workers (per Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research), employee engagement must include this critical workforce segment. When faced with the possibility of losing extended talent following a project or other initiative, employee engagement could be the competitive differentiator to retain them.

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