The rules of the employee engagement game have changed.
It used to be enough to ask a couple of questions about how employees were feeling about their wellbeing in an annual, or twice yearly, survey and that was enough to assess ‘engagement’.
But those days are over. With hybrid working, geopolitical uncertainty, increasing desire for purpose and a host of other factors, employee expectations have shifted.
To talk us through tackling this change on the podcast this week, is Euromonitor’s Global Director: Culture, Engagement and Inclusion, Adeife Onwuzulike, who is currently grappling with exactly this challenge.
She covers a huge variety of topics with practical and strategic advice such as: the importance of co-design and collaboration; the multigenerational workforce; measurement; intersectionality and much more.
One thing she makes crystal clear is that engagement today is all about two-way participation and employees want to be talked ‘with’ and not ‘to’.
To give you a flavour, at one point she says:
“ Everything that we are all trying to do now is build trust across the different ecosystems within our business. And trust is fuelled by participation. Trust is fuelled by a sense of good wellbeing. Trust is filled by the feeling of growth. When you start to look at it for that lens, you can’t help but think about how it’s a co-design approach as opposed to a top down.”
How to keep employees working (and engaged)
She also echoes one of the key themes that Sir Charlie Mayfield identifies in the Keep Britain Working review:
“One of the things we don’t really talk about, but we should, is this undertone of fear. There’s a lot of fear that’s driving sentiment.”
A self-confessed lover of honest conversations, she doesn’t shy away from inconvenient truths in this one, such as how business – regardless of pressure and time constraints – must find time to prioritise building relationships; the bedrock of trust and psychological safety.
As for professionals in the Workplace Culture and Employee Health and Wellbeing space? They need to have more grace, and patience, because cultural transformation takes time.
She explains how she is addressing these many challenges at Euromonitor and she even sings at the end, so stay tuned for that, and, of course, the alien question….
Listen on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. And why not share it with a colleague, or c-suite member, who would benefit from hearing the conversation?
Time line of conversation:
00:00 Introduction to the Leaders Podcast
00:35 This Week’s Challenge: Employee Engagement
01:44 Guest Introduction: Aade Zalucki
02:34 Designing a New Employee Experience Survey
03:51 Measuring Employee Experience
08:35 The Importance of Wellbeing and DEI
11:52 Building Trust and Collaboration
13:45 Generational Differences in the Workplace
18:48 Effective Communication Strategies
23:28 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
The MAD Leaders Club covers the hot topics in workplace culture, employee health and wellbeing with episodes so far on balancing profits and people, managing the multigenerational workforce and lack of engagement in wellbeing. Every episode takes a problem which is then worked through to resolution with an employer who has genuinely faced this themselves and so can talk honestly about what worked (and what didn’t). Check it out here on Apple and here on Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.
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