How best to manage the motivation and engagement of employees to drive business innovation and increase company’s productivity.
There are many economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for business managers and leaders to consider. One of the more pressing ones is the challenge of how best to manage the motivation and engagement of employees to drive business innovation and increase the company’s productivity and profitability. In the new pandemic world of social distancing in the workplace and greater home working, businesses have to reassess how they innovate the way of working and how they better manage the use of the digital technology revolution.
Returning to the workplace
Managing an orderly and sensible return to work spaces, requires businesses to assess which roles are location and time dependent and then look at new ways of organising the business operations that better align with employee preferences. This requires companies to be progressive in their thinking (1). Sadly, however I come across too many business managers that believe that in order for employees to keep their job in a time of the pandemic, they need to be seen regularly in the flesh, with the suggestion that employees need to even volunteer to go into the office, because redundancies are coming. This approach is based on the premise that a business can easily find a replacement worker, perhaps not quite as good, but they will do. This approach runs the risk of businesses taking on staff without a deep-rooted commitment to the company that will risk the business becoming more unstable, less efficient and creative.
Progressive employers are seeing this as an opportunity to rethink how their businesses move forward. They are seizing this opportunity to look at how they can change the working life by helping employees reduce the need for long commutes or slavish compliance with nine-to-five office occupancy. The aim of making changes is to reap the benefits of enhanced loyalty, flexibility, collaboration, productivity, improve company culture and staff retention.
Power of being a progressive business
Building and creating and then supporting a strong and healthy workplace culture is not easy. The ambition for any business leader is to establish a culture that enhances an employee’s experience with the business and encourages them to go that extra mile every single day. But it’s not just about increasing a company’s productivity or profitability. It is about creativity and having the right environment for employees to participate and thrive in. If employees are happy in their work and engaged with the business, they will be more likely to perform at a high level, remain loyal to the organisation and support it in difficult times.
There is a whole range of recognition and reward tools that can be used to recognise employee performance. These tools are an important alternative to a cash bonus which often gets included with regular wages to be swallowed up by regular outgoings. Non-cash alternatives not only have a more personal appeal, but also gives staff the chance to be additional rewarded and recognised throughout the year.
The recognition platform is designed to enable employees to highlight achievements and standout work of their colleagues. Values and goals are set for the entire company or for individual teams, from which, employees can give kudos, thanks and congratulations as and when it is deserved to those employees who achieve the values. Recognition is monitored by administrators via the Engagement Dashboard, from which managers can assess who their most active champions are. Budgets can be set to incentivise outstanding efforts, as well as running employee of the month nominations.
The aim of all these tools is to inspire a successful workplace culture by rewarding and incentivising performance. Managing employees to drive outstanding performance is always difficult and requires the use of a broad range of reward and recognition tools. Their aim is quite simply to transform the way in which employees behave and perform at a time when they are facing significant workplace and personal life challenges due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Wojciech Dochan
Managing Director, Busy Bees Benefits
Provider of the SmartHive Platform
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