According to Qualtrix 2020, Employee Experience Trend Report, 53% of employees around the world are engaged and, in most regions, employee engagement is not trending much. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted normal working culture from ‘working 9-6 in the office’ to remote working. This rapid unavoidable change causes several key challenges for leaders in many organisations, many of which are due to communication obstacles and the disruption of daily social activities. With teams suffering interpersonally right now due to remote work and lack of in-person interaction, leaders now more than ever are tasked with maintaining high employee engagement in this post-COVID era.
The NHRC team has reached out to one of our research fellows, Mr. Che Zulhaimee to seek his views on employee engagement.
1. What are the lessons learnt through the experiences of employee engagement during COVID-19?
Before the pandemic, employee engagement might have been taken lightly by most employers. This is understandable since everybody was in the office and there were regular interactions and communications formally and informally during office hours, break time, and even after office hours. However, during the pandemic, everyone was ‘left alone’ at home and the only communication that they had was via virtual or online platforms.
This situation was new to most of us and no one had ever experienced this before. Most employees who worked at home complained that they had to work extra hours during the pandemic. There were so many meetings and because of that, they had to put in extra hours after to complete their tasks.
We also had another situation where newly hired employees felt disengaged and ‘lost’ when they joined the company during the pandemic. They felt like they were left alone and had no one to turn to if they had any issues. They could not cope with the high expectations of their roles while they had little access to or knowledge and communications with the rest of the team. Upon realising that this was becoming a critical issue, the HR management team came up with an initiative to improve employee engagement through a virtual Teh Tarik session with the ‘newbies’. As a result, they felt more welcomed, their trust level with their supervisor, team and company increased and they were more motivated to perform their work as they no longer felt alone.
The situation was completely different before the pandemic where you had frequent and direct engagement with all of your subordinates. As humans, we need interactions and communications to feel connected. This is why employee engagement has now become one of the most critical factors that the leaders need to pay real attention to, in order to ensure high productivity and motivation amongst employees.
2. What are the factors that affect the level of engagement within an organisation?
One of the factors that can affect engagement is the leader’s trust in the employee. Before the pandemic, we clocked in and clocked out in the office. Employees’ working time is automatically recorded and detected. However, it was different when employees are working at home. Some leaders even set new rules such as their employees must log in to the virtual or online meeting platform to see their faces at 8:30 am or 9 am to clock in and 5:30 pm to clock out. They even make it mandatory for the employees to immediately respond to them, “When I call or email you must respond within 5-10 minutes.”
I understand that this is the new normal, but I believe that leaders implementing these kinds of instructions are very abnormal in this new environment. The main reason that a leader may feel compelled to take such drastic action is the lack of trust in their employees. Leaders may feel that their subordinates are less or not productive when working from home, as compared to working in the office, where the leader can see them performing their tasks.
Steve Jobs said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” So as a leader, give them some room to breathe and trust them to deliver their tasks rather than control them with arbitrary rules that may affect their motivations.
We may have heard of the story of a manager who scolded his executive saying, “I called you and your wife told me you were changing diapers. Why didn’t you return my call?” The executive then responded that “I called but your wife told me you were doing the laundry.”
Of course, there are different issues and challenges when you work at home. Hence, leaders must be more understanding and appreciative to comprehend their employees’ situation at home.
For the arrangement to work well, we must change from daily tracking based or hours of work to performance based on project completion. Objective Key Result (OKR) is one of the ways forward for most organisations to consider. Leaders also must learn how to implement AGILITY at the workplace and while working from home.
Another issue is burnout. There are a few suggestions to avoid this based on the advice from a doctor in one of the webinars that I joined recently:
1. Improve and improvise
2. Achieve more with less
3. Managers have to respect their subordinate’s time
4. Have a work-life balance such as exercise
5. Eat healthy
6. Do some recreational activities such as gardening and
7. Meditate daily
3. What is the key to maintaining high employee engagement today?
Different organisations have different needs and requirements or demands from their employees that may drive them towards a high engagement and high-performance culture.
To understand their needs and requirements, leaders need to start communicating with their employees. A small organisation can identify these factors or drivers by having direct conversations or communication with its employees. Large organisations prefer to use Chatbot or AI applications to help them in determining factors that are important to their employees.
However, the key factors in maintaining high employee engagement may be summarised as follows:-
1. Good compensation plan offered by the company
2. Trust is given by the leaders to their employees
3. Regular communications and engagement activities with all levels of employees
4. No favouritism among team members
5. Equality among all employees, especially when it comes to promotion with a clear process and career guideline
6. Clear direction and plan from the leaders and open discussion and communications with their subordinates
7. Respect, caring, and gratitude when dealing with all levels of employees
4. In your opinion, what drives employee engagement in Malaysia?
The main factor would be the employee retention. Nowadays, companies realise the cost of hiring is higher as compared to retention.
Secondly, engaged employees will stay longer with the company and are normally highly productive. An engaged team also creates a high-performance team and culture within the organisation. Tony Fernandes was once quoted as saying, “Employees come number one, customers come number two. If you have a happy workforce, they will look after your customers.”
5. Hogan’s leadership value chain states that personality drives leadership and leadership drives employee engagement. What is your comment?
In my opinion, the leaders of an organisation will determine the direction of the company. Hence, every organisation needs to choose the right leaders. And it’s the choice of the board or the management to select the leaders and managers, not the employees. There are a lot of studies and surveys that prove employees left their bad managers, not the company.
Read “Why People Really Quit Their Jobs by Lori Goler, Janelle Gale, Brynn Harrington and Adam Gran on Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2018/01/why-people-really-quit-their-jobs)
The Human Resource department has to play its role to influence the leaders and management of a company to promote employee engagement. Most leaders learned through their experience and understand the importance of employee engagement at the workplace especially leaders or management in large organisations. These kinds of leaders understand the importance of their employees to the organisation.
Simon Sinek said that “Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders.” HR may assist in planning for the engagement activities involving the top leaders of the company. Due to their busy schedule, HR needs to be selective in determining the type of engagement programmes and frequency of the events. AI Chatbots may also be used to help identify selected groups for the engagement sessions.
6. Another challenge to maintain engagement and a high performing remote team is identifying which team members are becoming disengaged. In your opinion, how can the leaders gain the trust of their employees so that they have open and honest conversations about engagement?
Usually, we only manage to identify disengaged employees or teams when it’s too late. To gain trust, leaders must learn to listen more and with empathy.
Leaders need to know how to be a coach. Coaching skills will help leaders to be better at listening and communications. Leaders with coaching skills will engage and communicate rather than direct or instruct. Employees will feel the leaders with coaching skills are more open and honest in their communications and without judgment, which will let and encourage employees to have open communications with their leaders,
A high-performance team may also be developed via AGILE or SCRUM, which requires leaders and team members to learn and understand the concept and the implementation. There are a few companies in Malaysia that have implemented AGILE at the workplace. We can learn from them how they implement them and what their success factors are to determine whether it’s suitable to be implemented at our own respective organisations.
7. With the shift to remote work becoming a norm in our country today, what are the leader’s role in maintaining their team’s well-being as part of the initiatives to maintain employee engagement?
Managers need to maintain regular and constant communications with the team and spend at least one hour talking to the subordinates either in a group or one-to-one. At the same time, having a clear KPIs that are agreed by both parties would also help to maintain high performance. Managers are also encouraged to have a special session with their team members to talk about something else other than work and take the opportunity to understand their employees better. It’s good also to sometimes play virtual games with the team or virtual treasure hunt. WFH is not as easy as it sounds. There are more challenges, especially for young parents or with school children. Some other strategies that might help are as follows:-
1. Make sure family members understand that you are working at home to avoid conflict.
2. Set rules and limit your working time at home, so that you can have a work-life balance.
3. Improve the process and set priorities.
4. Set break time and have some rest in between meetings.
5. Make it compulsory to exercise, do it with your family and have fun exercising.
6. Set a time to meditate at the end of working hours every day, especially if your work is stressful.
8. In your opinion, when should the leaders or organisation measure the engagement of their employees, and what are the possible methods to do so?
There are chatbots or artificial intelligence applications to assist in measuring employee engagement. This application is very crucial now since most of us are working from home. It’s impossible to gauge employee engagement by simply having one-to-one conversations virtually, especially if you have a big team.
On top of that, chatbot alone is not enough. All managers within the organisation must initiate employee engagement activities. This responsibility is no longer the sole function of the HR department or personnel.
As a people manager, every one of us has the responsibility to ensure our employee’s wellbeing and health, especially their mental health.
The HR department must be knowledgeable to initiate and help managers on the ground to conduct their own employee engagement activities. Simple engagement activities such as virtual Teh Tarik sessions could be done immediately without much assistance. The key point during the session is for the managers to listen more and talk less. Consultants may help to design online games such as virtual treasure hunts, virtual team building etc.
Simon Sinek said, “Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders.
Virtual employee engagement incurs low cost or no cost at all but it can provide high impact where management only needs to invest their time, and bring their coffee or Teh Tarik during the session.
9. The organisation cannot rely solely on leaders to keep the employees engaged. What kind of support do the leaders need from the organisation to keep the team engaged?
Employees need to know what is happening to the company during a pandemic especially when they are working from home. One important thing during this period is official communications from the company such as memos from the CEO or newsletters. The communication channel must also be via official and unofficial channels such as email, WhatsApp, or Telegram. It is much better if the company has its own social media platform.
Other than that, leaders and HR departments should also encourage and promote virtual activities and wellness programmes to be organised by the employees themselves. Usually, this kind of activity will gain more participation from the employees. Employees are innovative, a lot of virtual games, virtual sharing sessions, etc can be organised and encouraged by the company.
Continuous or long-term programmes such as weight loss competition etc. may receive high employee participation. They will surely have their interests and if supported by the company, more activities will be organised by the employees themselves.
10. What is your advice to the organisational leaders in keeping their teams engaged and productive during this post-COVID era?
I believe that the pandemic has brought us something positive that we need to continue doing. For instance, knowledge and training have been made easily accessible online and it is now possible to learn across and beyond borders. I believe working from home will continue to be the favourite and become a good option for companies and employees. Hence, in the post-pandemic era, employers should continue to focus on virtual or online engagement activities and communications.
There are a lot of innovative virtual engagement programs such as virtual games or competitions, virtual treasure hunts, virtual team building, and virtual Teh Tarik sessions. These activities can be organised internally or with support from external parties or consultants.
It’s also good if those virtual sessions can also be tailored to employee wellbeing such as virtual run, weight loss programmes or competition, or virtual coaching and counselling. Virtual engagement could also go beyond or after activities to include fun sessions such as virtual cooking classes or open talk sessions where participants can share recipes.
Companies should promote good deeds such as corporate social responsibility and charitable contributions, not only by the company but together with the participation from employees. These activities will help to inculcate the spirit of giving and gratitude among employees.
Good mental health means happy and engaged employees, which can translate into higher productivity. Happy employees, engaged employees, and well-informed employees result in less negative energy within the company. All this will ultimately result in better employee performance and greater organisational success and productivity.
Che Zulhaimee bin Abdullah is the Vice President of Human Capital & Administration of Honda Malaysia. He is a Research Fellow with the National Human Resource Centre (NHRC) of HRD Corp.
The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
