As I did research for my New York Times bestseller, Building a Magnetic Culture: How to Attract and Retain Top Talent to Create an Engaged, Productive Workforce, I identified several shifts that are occurring in the work environment today. In order to properly engage your people, understanding and reacting to these elements is crucial, as it’s the only way to ensure growth, development, and enhanced productivity.

In today’s workplace culture, it’s vital to find ways to engage your workforce. Engaged employees feel invested in their own personal success, as well as the overall success of your company.

Here are three of the most critical shifts affecting the business and work environment, and some key considerations for reacting to them:

Shift 1: The global move in the workplace

In Hay Group’s New Rules of Engagement  report, they state that the shift in economic power to the emerging markets of Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America has created a global “talent market.” As I have pointed out in my book, strategies have to be put into place to ensure that local employees can work with, and adapt to, new global additions to organizations.

Your call to action: Recognize how important it is to “protect your flank”, knowing that there are organizations from all over the world who might be ready to pluck your top talent away from you.

Whatever your company’s approach is globally, it needs to be translated to fit into the culture of local countries. Michael Webley, Head of Global People Insight at Tesco said, “We have engagement champions whose job it is to translate what our approach means for their country, and implement suitable actions plans.” It is great they have created these “Engagement Champion” positions, but it’s also important that these people are both empowered and enabled, so that they can effectively make such translations from global to local.

Your call to action: Recognize that this is a wonderful opportunity to expand your talent acquisition and reach, garnering top talent from different regions and/or time zones.

Shift 2: Increased environmental awareness

This is especially relevant when it comes to both Millennials and “digital natives,” the younger generation who are currently entering the work force. They are passionate about environmentally friendly practices and want to work at a socially responsible company.

Your call to action: Be sure to practice what you preach when it comes to the environment and your social responsibility as a company. It is one thing to talk about sustainability, but another to actually enforce it, and your employees will be able to tell the difference.

For example, you can’t call yourselves environmentally friendly, but then offer a potential employee a plastic bottle of water during their interview. It sends a mixed message and shows that your environmentally friendly practices are only surface level. The candidate may choose to immediately turn around and decide not to work at an employer that continues the needless addition of more plastic to landfills around the world. As Hay Group’s report points out, in the digital era it is now incredibly easy for employees to publicly call out these inconsistencies. It is not a question of whether or not negative environmental practices will go viral on social media, but when.

Shift 3: The demographic change in the workforce

Demographics have changed so substantially that the Millennial population will eclipse the Boomer population by next year. As the Baby Boomers are hitting retirement age and the Millennials are ever-present in the workforce, there is an increasing age diversity in the workplace. In fact, one of the greatest tensions in the current workplace is between Baby Boomer managers and Millennials, as they each have entirely different value sets and engagement drivers.

Your call to action: Assess whether you could be more flexible about how, when, and where work is done, and realize that different age groups need different kinds of training. For instance, it’s important that boomers learn from Millennials. Equally as vital, “old school” organizations need to train their Baby Boomer managers to let go of antiquated workplace policies, such as formal dress codes and strict working hours. If you are hiring the right people, you can trust them and thus, it is not necessary to strictly monitor or visibly “see” them working. Work is what you do, not where you go.

 

Kevin Sheridan has spent thirty years as a high-level Human Capital Management consultant. He has helped some of the world’s largest companies break down detrimental processes and rebuild a culture that fosters productive engagement, earning him several distinctive awards and honors in the process. Kevin’s most recent book, “Building a Magnetic Culture,” made the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today best-seller lists.

SOURCE: http://blog.haygroup.com/the-new-and-emerging-elements-of-employee-engagement/