Best 7 ways to increase employee engagement during the pandemic

Probably there’s no area left in the society where the pandemic hasn’t hit. Children to elderly people, everyone is clueless about the future. The increased number of deaths and increased number of COVID-positive patients are simply haunting every human being of this world. In such a situation maintaining a high employee, engagement rate is tough. No matter how tough employee engagement during the pandemic, we have to achieve it at any cost otherwise keeping all organizational operations active will not be possible. In such a pandemic situation, we have to simply energize the teams. An energized team is productive and helpful in keeping the productivity level high even during the pandemic. 

How to do employees engagement during the pandemic is the question of many organizations and human resource management professionals. It is not that before the pandemic HR departments were not aware of employee engagement. But before the pandemic, they were following some different ways in order to engage and energize their teams. Today, we have a completely different scenario and as a result, we have to follow some different as well as super-effective ways in order to keep each employee energized and engaged regardless of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

There are some ways that we can follow in order to energize the team and increase employee engagement. Before we explore those ways, we should take a look at why employee engagement is important during the pandemic. Running and keeping an organization is tough during the pandemic but the situation will be tougher if an organization is suffering from a poor employee engagement rate. 

Why is employee engagement important during the pandemic? 

According to the experts, now businesses are being disrupted. New business models, advanced technologies, agile ways of working, and new work regulations are taking the place. Somehow the pace was slow before the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts are saying that this pandemic has just accelerated this transformation of organizations. This transformation is directly driving sustainable change on a behavioral, cultural, and organizational level. 

Many organizations are indeed adopting these changes faster and becoming the leaders of the industry. But there are some organizations in all industries that are failing to adopt these changes. There are many reasons why some organizations are failing to adopt these changes but one thing is common in all these organizations and that is poor employee engagement rate. 

If it comes to boosting the employee engagement rate and making organizations truly future-proof, we cannot deny the benefits of employee engagement rate. Without any doubt, employee engagement is tough but there is no better alternative to it when it comes to keeping an organization functional and productive in all ways.  Apart from this, there are a lot of other benefits of increased employee engagement such as better team performance, higher employee retention, and lower turnover rates, faster objective achievement, lower absenteeism, less workplace stress, and so on. And you can understand that all these things are truly important in order to make organizations fully functional. 

How can you energize your team and increase employee engagement during the pandemic? 

Increasing team engagement during the pandemic is challenging. When employee engagement is one of the strongest pillars of an organization, you should not skip it. How you can increase your organization’s employee engagement, we have found out some effective ways for that. So, without more ado, let’s directly explore those ways- 

  1. Help your teams with the right time management- we have seen that there are a lot of organizations that are failing to achieve their goals just because of the poor time management knowledge and skills of their teams. You should not commit the same mistake. Since the onboarding time, you should train each of your employees about the right time management in accordance with the organizational requirements and policy. When a team successfully does time management, it becomes more productive and successful in achieving the defined goals. 

In order to develop the best time management skills of all your employees, you have to conduct several training sessions, conduct surveys, and track each employee. In this way, you will be able to know which employees need more help and which employees are ready to help others. The in-house office regime is paused due to the pandemic. And that’s why you have to choose online ways that are remotely accessible for your employees. There are many tools that can help you conduct online training, survey, and employee tracking. By using these tools and technologies, you can make all your teams understand how to do time management and increase the productivity level easily. 

The constant and right practices of team management are effective in taking an organization to the next level irrespective of the market condition. 

  1. Try to be a bit personal- No, we are not suggesting you be involved in your employees’ personal lives. But you should take a genuine interest in their lives. In this way, you will be able to make them feel like they belong to your family. When employees feel that employers simply see them as workers, employees do not prefer to be engaged in that organization. Employees prefer to be in an organization where they feel valued, respected and trusted. 

During the pandemic situation, they are working from home. The HR management team should take care of their mental health. HRs should ask employees about their work-at-home challenges and the health of other family members. In this way, employees will feel more valued and connected. They will feel happy to serve the organization. They will be motivated to perform better and they will also think about the goals of your organization. 

  1. Properly emphasize the company culture- in order to enable a perfect remote work environment, organizations have to shift significantly in all ways. But when it comes to company culture, we must say the culture should not move an inch. If you let your employees erode or not obey your company culture, when the pandemic will be over you will find out that your company culture has vanished. And that’s why we always suggest being strict about your company culture. 

You should build your organization around transparency and trust. You need to ensure that transparency and trust are being maintained each day. No matter what is the situation of the market and the rest of the industry, you should communicate your company culture in all possible ways. In this way, your employees will be aware of their duties and how to maintain trust and transparency at the same time. 

  1. Communicate your organizational goals- when it comes to communicating your organizational goals, you should not leave any stone unturned. You should make use of every chance you get in order to properly communicate all organizational goals. You should make each employee understand how an individual goal is important in achieving organizational goals. 

Now HRs have to find new ways in order to communicate organizational culture remotely. You can have several video conferences, online games, and so on. HRs should communicate goals in all these ways. Communicating company goals should be attractive enough otherwise employees will be bored to listen to goals in a fixed way. HRs should invent new ways to communicate goals and get the full attention of all employees. Just by continuing these things, you will find that they are automatically collaborating more with other employees, conveying company culture and goals to others, and being more sincere about their roles and responsibilities. 

  1. Lead your employees with good examples- when it comes to energizing a team and increasing employee engagement during the pandemic, HRs should encourage and lead all employees with solid examples. When HRs prepare guidance and motivation online sessions for all employees, they should support their statements with the best examples. In this way, employees will be able to understand exactly what the organization is expecting from them. 

We have seen that sometimes employees cannot understand exactly what the organization is expecting from them because HRs communicate goals, culture, etc without any examples. You should not commit the same mistake. HRs should prepare a list of good examples within the organization and commute their contributions to each employee of the organization. In this way, everyone will be more engaged, dedicated, and aware of their roles and responsibilities. 

  1. Listen and get feedback from employees- in order to boost employee engagement during the pandemic, HRs should carefully listen to each employee. They should listen to each employee and collect all feedback. In this way, HRs will be able to understand how employees are feeling to serve an organization remotely. 

When employees are performing remotely, they are far from the eyes of HRs and employers. How they are feeling, knowing that is a bit tough. But there are a lot of tools for communication and HRs can take the help of those tools in order to communicate and get feedback from all employees. By feedback analysis, an organization will be able to understand the pain points of all employees.  In this way, a company will be able to improve its employee engagement strategy. 

This is the first time that nearly all organizations have started working remotely. Most organizations were not ready with any remote work strategy in order to deal with the pandemic situation. And that’s why many organizations are going to ‘try and test’ phase in order to find the most effective strategy for employee engagement. We also deployed the same thing. After so many tries, we have found out that listening to employees and collecting feedback is truly helpful when it comes to keeping them truly engaged during the pandemic. 

  1. Track employees with the best tools- you may have prepared a new employee engagement strategy in order to keep all of your employees truly connected to the organization. But that strategy is working or not- how can you know that? Knowing such a thing is truly easy if you equip your HR department with robust employee tracking and management software. After deploying a newly developed employee engagement strategy, you will be able to track each employee, measure the productivity of each employee, and decide if the new strategy is effective for which teams and which teams need something more powerful as well as motivating. 

Nearly all remote organizations are taking the help of cloud-based hr management software solutions with amazing employee tracking features. If you are yet to enable such a software solution, you should do it as soon as possible. Instead of going for an average software solution, you should go for a software system that comes with cloud benefits. In this way, all your employees will be able to use the software from the comfort of their homes. In order to enjoy such a solution, your HR department and other employees do not need to install any additional hardware or software. Just a browser is enough to explore all the amazing features and benefits of this organization. 

These are the 7 best ways of increasing employee engagement during the pandemic. In these seven ways, we can see that the use of remote technologies has become evident. When there is no escape from using the best tools and technologies for supporting the remote work environment, you should start finding the best one for your organization. 

If you are getting completely clueless about it, we can help you here. If you are in search of a complete human resource management software solution with cloud benefits, you can easily go for HRMWARE. This is an absolutely stunning hr management software solution with all the best feature sets. From employee tracking to payroll management- you can perform nearly every task of new human resource management with the help of this software solution. The most exciting fact is that this solution is free for organizations that are running with up to 10 employees. Powering small businesses and startups is no more challenging in this pandemic situation with the help of such a robust hr management software solution. Similarly, employee engagement during the pandemic will not be a bar.