Increasing Employee Engagement In Workplace Initiatives
Since the pandemic, workers have gained a considerable amount of leverage in the job market, including work benefits (mental and financial wellbeing benefits), work flexibility, and salary increases.
But now we’re in 2022 and entering a recession; companies are slowing down their growth strategies and some organisations have even made the difficult decision to lay off some of their staff. It can cost around £30,000 to lose, replace, and train a new employee, which highlights how crucial it is for organisations to be able to retain their top talent in such unprecedented times.
A recent CIPD Report discusses the close links between wellbeing at work and the positive effects it has on employee engagement, organisational performance, and retention. This sounds easy enough - right?
Yes, you can find an organisation to partner with to promote employee wellbeing internally, or come up with your own initiatives around mental wellbeing, which are now being considered a necessity, not just a perk.
But it’s not just enough to just offer these initiatives - if you don’t have the workplace culture in place to ensure that employees are really utilising these opportunities, or feel comfortable in doing so, it won’t make the positive difference you’re looking to achieve.
For example, mental wellbeing platform UnMind offered their employees a personal development budget, but only saw a 20% uptake - which was much lower than expected. After adding an easy to use platform to utilise their budget, and creating a learning community atmosphere internally, they were able to increase this. This shows how important it is to have plans and processes in place to ensure that any initiative is recognised and utilised by as many employees as possible.
There’s plenty of research and figures discussing the proven benefits of offering employee volunteering initiatives (here, and here), but not much guidance on how to create the best culture around utilising volunteering initiatives, and the wellbeing benefits that follow on from this. We’ve created 3 top tips for creating this internal culture, which are all must-haves if you want to ensure that your employees not only know that this opportunity exists, but actively utilise it to its full benefit.
Management & Senior Leadership Engagement: Without having buy-in and involvement from senior leadership employees, more junior members of staff may not feel comfortable enough to take the time out of their day to engage in an activity offered by their organisation, such as volunteering. It’s not enough to just have these initiatives promoted by CSR/People teams, the engagement of senior level employees is crucial in setting a precedent for younger staff members, demonstrating the importance of prioritising employee wellbeing and confidence through these initiatives.
Plan & Deliver: It’s great to offer a wellbeing initiative such as an employee volunteering platform; however, without having a plan in place for continuous engagement throughout each year, employees are likely to forget that they even have this opportunity. Not all employees will be available to utilise their volunteering time all at once, so having a plan in place to promote continuous engagement will make a huge difference to it being utilised. This can be through different engagement events throughout the year, setting incentives, or setting out time each month where volunteering time is promoted.
Storytelling: It’s great to see engagement in the form of numbers - especially if you’re targeted on this sort of thing - but often employees aren’t actually engaged by this. Stories are far more engaging, and work better to increase participation. For example, would you rather hear that 50 of your colleagues did some volunteering, or read a story about how two of your colleagues completely transformed the website and engagement of a small NGO working towards improving the wellbeing of children who have experienced grief and loss in their lives? I know which I’d choose!
Considering that it costs the equivalent of 6-9 months of an employee’s salary to replace them, it’s pretty clear that employee wellbeing benefits, such as employee volunteering, are a win-win.
What companies need to focus on now, is how to implement and utilise these benefits to get the most out of what they can offer. If they want to add a wellbeing value of £911 per year to each of their employees, it takes more than a few company newsletters and the occasional LinkedIn post.
If you’re new here and want to learn more about us, please contact hello@wearematchable.com.
ABOUT MATCHABLE
At Matchable we work with companies and their employees to match them with high impact and innovative skilled volunteering projects at non-profits and impact startups.
If you’re interested in offering employee volunteering to your team, and upskilling through our social impact projects, get in touch here.