Engaged employees help businesses survive and succeed—in terms of revenue, work efficiency, innovation, collaboration, growth, and empowerment. This is why businesses with engaged employees are able to make substantial gains in a short span of time. When employees are unhappy and disengaged, they can send both profits and productivity into a nose dive. While organizations are constantly innovating ways to retain talent through employee engagement, Learning and Development (L&D) can lead the way in creating a work culture of corporate wellness where employees feel valued, supported, involved, and empowered.
Here are five tips to help businesses drive employee engagement through L&D initiatives:
- Take advantage of team learning to infuse value into work life. Companies can shift the focus from individual performance to team learning by sharing good case practices that provide challenges, resources, and feedback. Enabling employees to perform as a part of team where they can maximize the strength of every member and achieve better results will increase their ability to mold their personality in a dynamic context and also evolve as an individual entity at the same time.
- Encourage collaboration through social platforms and informal learning activities. Help your employees build meaningful relationships with each other using technology platforms that facilitate informal communication on a day-to-day basis. These technology platforms strengthen and streamline communication across the board through fun and easy-to-use apps that work much faster than e-mails and the intranet. Some employees may still struggle to build relationships with colleagues, but they, too, can be engaged through social learning activities where everyone can warm up and get talking outside of their daily responsibilities.
- Capitalize on coaching for improved corporate wellness. Another effective way to enhance employee engagement is to invest time, effort, and resources in helping employees grow in their career. Different employees have different career goals and motivations, so organizations can use mentoring and coaching to facilitate professional skill improvement. Mentoring also encourages the formation of purposeful, professional relationships that convey your company is committed to the professional development of its employees and values their contribution.
- Provide leadership training to create a culture of productivity and personal satisfaction. Leadership skills are essential to creating a performance-driven culture where employees are empowered to bring better results and grow. The management can initiate learning and development programs that provide behavioral training and conduct leadership development workshops that aim to boost productivity. When using this approach, managers need to incorporate microlearning where they tie small and easy chunks of knowledge into a purposeful, practical whole. This will enable employees to fully immerse themselves in the learning process and also find practical applications to yield better business outcomes.
- Promote ubiquitous learning to engage employees across the board. Let your employees learn anytime and anywhere they want with easy access to resources that are relevant to their professional needs. Companies can offer a personalized learning experience through self-explanatory e-learning modules or through peer-generated content that is socially shared. Technology platforms can be leveraged for this purpose, and employees can be encouraged to join discussion forums or portals with tangible rewards as incentives.
Generating Corporate Wellness Through Employee Engagement
Investing in employee engagement through learning and development programs can help keep employees happy and highly productive; companies with a happy and hardworking workforce are typically successful. So invest in the professional growth of your most valuable assets—your employees—and it will truly pay off in the form of sustainable business success.
Austen Lee believes the key to corporate wellness is identifying talented individuals and harnessing their efforts by understanding what motivates them. As the Digital Marketing head of Rewardz Malaysia, he has taken it upon himself to inspire employers to achieve employee engagement by nurturing talent with rewards.
