Organisations which actively listen to their employees and try to understand what attracts, retains and engages them and who invest in strategies around sustainable engagement have lower retention risks, significantly lower rates of absenteeism, and operating margins of up to three times higher than their nearest competitors. These are among the findings of the Willis Towers Watson 2016 Global Talent Management and Rewards and Global Workforce Studies.
"It's also important for organisations to understand how sustainable engagement impacts on performance," says Jenny Smyth, talent and rewards lead with Willis Towers Watson Ireland. "Our Employee Insights practice surveys over seven million employees for clients worldwide every year. We have built up significant databases of knowledge on what attracts, retains and engages employees as a result."
The firm also looks at it from the employer perspective, with some surprising results, or possibly not so surprising depending on your perspective. “Our bi-annual global study of over 2,000 best-practice employers indicates that their views on what attracts and retains employees are not always in line with those of their employees.”
The Global Workforce study of 32,000 employees has found that the main factors impacting attraction and retention are basic salary, career progression and opportunities to learn. "In the basic pay space, this means that a lot of organisations need to benchmark themselves against the market to ensure that they are not falling behind,"says Smyth. "For smaller organisations which can't compete on pay levels, it can mean looking at different elements of the package such as bonuses and flexible working. Increasingly, we have clients asking us about how they can be transparent around these rewards packages."
This growing need for transparency arises from the increased complexity of the packages on offer and the need to communicate the total value of the package. They start with basic salary and then move onto a range of other benefits such as pensions, car allowances or company cars, sports club memberships, wellness programmes, learning opportunities, flexible holiday entitlements and working arrangements, health insurance, life insurance – the list goes on and on.
Explaining the value of these packages and how choosing different options can alter their value can be challenging to say the least. Many employers are taking a leaf out of the pensions industry’s book and going online with interactive benefits statements to address this.
“They are increasingly moving from paper to online,” says Smyth. “It’s about employers offering greater transparency around rewards and explaining the value to employees.”
Career advancement
Career advancement is the other crucial issue. “Millennials generally don’t want to stay with the same employer for life. They want to move and they want new learning experiences. Larger organisations are now addressing this and developing career frameworks which can help people see career paths within the organisation and possibly move to different disciplines. They are supporting people to become more employable.”
While millennials have a propensity to move from job to job with almost alarming frequency, they are also open to returning to a previous employer if the timing and conditions are right. This tendency has not been lost on progressive employers, according to Smyth.
“There is a lot of ‘boomerang’ activity in the market at the moment and employers are using engagement strategies to attract employees who have left their organisation to boomerang back to them again in the future.”
These engagement strategies must be sustainable, she explains. “Sustainable engagement means employees being motivated, enabled, and energised to be at their best all the time. Engaged employees want their employer to succeed and have an emotional attachment to the company; enabled employees have a work environment that supports productivity and performance; and energised employees know that their employer is concerned about their physical, interpersonal and emotional well-being at work. Employees who feel that their employer really does care about them are far more engaged and motivated.”
This is where active listening comes to the fore. Things have moved on a lot since employers did a once-a-year survey to find out what their employees thought of the company and the work environment. Not only are they are carrying out these generalised surveys more often but they are also surveying employees quite regularly to gather data on much more specific topics.
“They are carrying out regular surveys of different groups of employees,” Smyth explains. “It might be conducted when they join to ask them about the onboarding process, it could be when they leave or the focus could be to ask all employees or just certain groups about the company health and wellbeing processes and programmes, anything that the company needs to get the employee view on. We have developed the Willis Towers Watson PULSE software to assist employers with these surveys. The software does more than standard off-the-shelf survey packages, as users get access to the database of Willis Towers Watson knowledge that we have built up over the years and they can choose from 200 validated questions and 100 annually updated benchmarks. This offers a cost-effective way of ensuring continuous listening and achieving sustainable engagement.”