Elevating Engagement: How New-age Trends can Move the Needle for Employee Experience (EX) in 2024

Today's dynamic work environment demands CHROs and HR leaders to go beyond traditional engagement methods and adopt innovative strategies on elevating employee experience. The question arises: What are those transformative elements of cultivating a positive EX that help enhance talent retention, engagement, wellbeing, and overall business success.

To deep dive into best practices and emerging trends, BI WORLDWIDE, in collaboration with People Matters, organised an exclusive roundtable discussion, Delhi Chapter on – Future of Employee Engagement Reinvented: New Rules for Disruption-proof Employee Experience (EX) in 2024. A stellar lineup of HR leaders from top organisations across industries deliberated on the challenges and opportunities of building inspiring and resilient workplaces that meet the demands of the future workforce.

Rupak Ray, Regional Director, North and Prasad Poosarla, Chief Technology Officer, BI WORLDWIDE India, expertly led and enriched the conversation with insights from BI WORLDWIDE's global research – ‘𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐑𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭’. An annual initiative, this research study sheds light on the 12 decisive ‘rules’, having the greatest influence on employees’ relationship with their organisation. It helps gain insights into and empowers organisations to stay ahead of the evolving expectations of employees.

However, the highlight of the roundtable discussion was an insightful exchange of innovative ideas and success stories among industry experts, on the 5 key parameters that lay the foundation of BI WORLDWIDE’s New Rules of Engagement research – onboarding, recognition, talent mobility, deskless EX and belonging.

Mastering a Transformative Onboarding

A seamless onboarding experience is not a one-time event, but a continual process. It is defined by a new hire’s intent to stay, time-to-proficiency and sense of belonging in an organisation. Some strategies that can help drive these outcomes are:

• Personalised dashboards, enabling new hires to foresee their career growth trajectory in an organisation.
• Aspirational rewards to employees right from day one for reaching key milestones.
• Personalised connects with HRs and senior leadership, along with regular check-ins, dipstick surveys and more, at different onboarding stages.
• Incentivising hiring journeys to stand out as the preferred workplace for candidates.
• Leveraging buddies, managers, leaders, and other stakeholders to enhance belonging and empower the new hires to come to speed.
• Mandatory in-person onboardings to enable new hires experience the work culture and establish connections with teams.
• Pre-joining learning programs to help new hires understand role expectations, business objectives, upskill/reskill and more.

Building Future Talent with Talent Mobility

In today’s day and age, talent needs to be mobile. Employees should feel ‘full-stack’ i.e.  competent at different roles. Cross-leveraging employees, assimilating returning workers and emergence of AI & other tech are top concerns in the current talent landscape. Strategies that can help address these concerns and drive talent mobility are:

• Reskilling tenured employees and offering new career opportunities as rewards.
• Curated challenges like ‘Learnathons’ and ‘Hackathons’ promoting innovation and offering a plethora of cross-stream/cross-vertical job opportunities as rewards.
• Weekly learning snippets, LMS and other external courses with third-party providers to drive a continuous learning journey.
• Immersive learning journeys through talent labs, wherein employees choose their learning paths (as researcher, analyst, advisor, etc.), shadowing different roles.
• Career expo days to create awareness of the businesses wherein an organisation operates, enabling employees to make informed career growth decisions.
• Identifying a set of future skills and organising shadowing programs for employees to inculcate the skills.

Nurturing a Sense of Lasting Belonging

Creating a sense of belonging is another critical aspect of employee engagement. This includes a culture where employees feel valued, employee well-being & happiness, career growth opportunities, and more. Some strategies that can be instrumental are:

• Leveraging audio-visual tools like movies on organisational compliance policies with subtitles in preferred languages for visually impaired employees to drive DEI.
• Encouraging fair gender, racial and cultural representation in corporate videos to foster belonging for all employees across the board.
• Routine surveys on employees’ experience of the organisation – work culture, managerial & team support, etc. Considering the survey results to uphold accountability for workforce behaviours.

Driving Innovative and Impactful Recognition

Rewards and recognition encourage reciprocity, obliging employees to give it back with desired positive behaviours. No wonder 50% of all recognition sent is by 10% of top recognition recipients. Some strategies to deliver meaningful and impactful recognition are:

• Building a common platform that keeps tabs on the contributions of all employees. The platform should enable employees to earn points and redeem aspirational rewards.
• Sending hand-written personalised notes by senior leadership to create ‘moments of pride’ for employees.
• Aligning employee R&R programs with organisational mission, vision, and values to drive desired behaviours.

Fostering an Inclusive Culture for Deskless Employees

Deskless employees are not faceless employees. Day-to-day inclusion matters and making remote workers feel valued, supported, and motivated is crucial. Strategies that can play a pivotal role are:

• Organising hybrid Family Day, Cultural Day and other celebrations to make both on-premise and remote employees feel included.
• Hosting strategic, in-person kick-off meetings at the year’s beginning and in-person town halls at regular intervals, encouraging deskless employees to visit office premises.
• Nominating ‘Advocates for Deskless Employees’, who will operate as intermediaries between an organisation and remote workforce.

Rise of EX: Reshaping the Future of Workplace

The roundtable discussion underlined the significance of creating a positive, meaningful, and fulfilling EX throughout the entire tenure of an employee with an organisation. The HR leaders delved into the importance of personalised onboarding, meaningful recognition, skills-driven talent mobility, fostering a strong sense of belonging, and inclusive deskless culture to reengage and revitalize the current workforce. An integrated EX strategy has the potential to significantly enhance trust, collaboration, and productivity, transforming business bottom line for an organisation.