Evolving Role of HR in Employee Engagement

Many organizations worldwide had to adapt to a new normal this past year, and it wasn’t easy on most. People lost jobs, were forced to work in unsafe conditions to keep a roof over their heads, and had to keep working like it was business as usual while dealing with unimaginable loss and suffering.

HR was at the helm through all of this, steering the ship through these murky waters. Now, they face the new challenge of getting employees to start working at the office again. Once again, HR is responsible not only to ensure that productivity levels are maintained but also to make sure that they are meaningfully engaged with the organization’s activities.

They’re now also the ones who are responsible for hiring the manpower organizations lost in the past year and for streamlining the employee onboarding process and HR’s Role in it.

But before we delve deeper into HR’s Role in maintaining employee engagement and how it’s evolving, let’s talk about employee engagement in hr.

What is employee engagement in HR?

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According to Forbes, employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals.

In the article by Kevin Kruse, the CEO of LEADx, employee engagement is not the same thing as employee satisfaction - or even employee happiness.

What is the Role of HR in employee engagement?

HR's Role is to ensure employee engagement throughout the times. Employee engagement itself is a relatively new phenomenon. Before the 1990s, HR was all about employee satisfaction and not much else, and no mind was given to whether the employee cared about their organization or not.

HR's main focus has always been getting results from the workforce, but experts now reckon that this needs to change.

In an interview with Forbes Magazine, Lindsay Lagreid talked about the need for HR to take a more employee-centric approach to matters in the future. She and her team at Limeade Institute have sizable research supporting the fact that successful companies are ones who care about their employees as people. According to Lagreid herself, “HR is the architect of the employee experience and needs to act as the unrelenting advocate of the employee voice to leadership.”

Nowadays, it's getting harder and harder for employers to retain talented personnel. This is because people don't just look for a stable job they can work at for life anymore.

They're looking for growth, challenges, a rewarding career, and most of all, they're looking for a happy life. If their job is in the way of all this, they might consider drastic changes in their life.

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Evolution of HRs role in employee engagement

An HR is a facilitator between workers, managers, and executive leadership. So HR teams have a critical role to play in maintaining employee engagement.

Manager's duty

Something like employee engagement was always present in all organizations - it showed itself in the way many managers handled day-to-day affairs in the company and around the office, in the way they made sure all the employees were happy and cultivated a close-knit team that relied on each other to make things happen.

This has always been the norm in great and successful companies. Still, now that it's been given a name and people realize how essential it is to success - especially post-lockdown when employee retention is harder than ever—HR has started to get involved.

Now, HR is tasked with ensuring that the managers are empowered to cultivate the conditions necessary around the workplace to encourage employee engagement.

HR and how it evolves

Amid these changing conditions, HR needs to shift strategies. As we mentioned before, it now needs to focus more on what the employees need to stay engaged and happy and advocate for them with the higher-ups rather than for the higher-ups and get the results they want from the company's workforce.

In that light, let's discuss all the things that HR will need to adapt to and what HR needs to do to ensure employee satisfaction.

Recruiting

Put more focus on hiring the right kind of employees - the ones who would find the job interesting, or who got into this line of work out of a desire to do this for a living. Alternatively, you can hire employees that identify with your organization's message and whose personal lives align with their goals.

Job enrichment

Take steps to make the job fulfilling and meaningful. This involves making employees feel a sense of purpose and need, stating their needs clearly, and cultivating fair values in the office. Employees should trust and identify with the work culture and its role.

Take regular surveys

You must run an employee engagement survey every year rather than employee satisfaction and rethink your strategies based on the results. Instead of focusing on what the employees need to do, what upper management wants them to do, HR should now focus on what employees need to be more engaged and what the company can do to facilitate these changes.

Investment decisions and any changes in the workplace should be made based on these survey results.

Training and onboarding new employees

When new recruits reach this stage, HR would now need to tell them how they fit into the company and how their contributions are important and make their roles seem meaningful to the employees. Emphasize how they're a vital part of furthering the organization's mission and take steps to follow through on these promises and claims.

Conclusion

HR departments in companies worldwide are now dealing with a workforce that has drastically different approaches to work and their careers than the workforce did two decades ago.

Employee engagement is more relevant now than ever, with increasing competition and pressure on organizations to do better, and how vital employee engagement is in this struggle.

Gone are the days when the end goal of HR was to ensure mere employee satisfaction, and new HR approaches and policies need to reflect this. Still, with the help of some retraining and an adaptive attitude that focuses more on employee wellbeing, this won't be too hard to achieve!