Providing a healthy work environment can boost up the motivation and productivity of an employee. This is quite well-known by almost all the companies today. This is the reason that most of the firms today try their best to offer the best facilities to their employees.
Different companies have different reasons for providing their employees with the best employee engagement programs. But whatever it is, having proper planning is very crucial in order to get the right output without meeting the challenges.
Benefits of Employee Engagement Program
Before heading towards the challenges that become a barrier in most of the employee engagement programs, it is a great idea to look at the brighter side. Understanding the benefits of employee engagement programs can help in knowing its actual importance.
Though there can be an endless list of benefits, here are some of the basic and common ones listed.
- It helps in increasing the safety of the employee.
- It helps in taking care of the employee’s health.
- It keeps the employees happy.
- It offers higher work satisfaction to the employees.
- The happiness and satisfaction are extended to the employee’s home too.
- It leads to a reduced amount of absenteeism.
- It increases the loyalty of the employees and also the retention of the employees.
Problems faced by most of the Employee Engagement Programs
Due to the benefits, most of the companies today deal with employee engagement programs. But there are some problems that these programs may need to face.
1.Not Having Proper Strategies
One of the most common problems that take place quite often is not having a proper plan of action for the program. The top management of the company may think of having a proper employee engagement program but the result depends on the team that implements it. In order to have a proper program set-up, it is important to have proper feedback from the employees. This is the most crucial step that most of the firms miss out on.
Most of the companies plan strategies based on their guess-work. Hence, most of the demands of the employees remain answered. This leads to unhappy employees and also leads to lower employee retention.
2. Not Getting Enough Support from Partners
In order to have a proper employee engagement program conducted, you need to invest at least some amount of money. Rewards for the employees, health benefits, perks, and many others require investments. If the company is run by more than one person in the partnership, there can be a conflict between the partners that can lead to a problem in having such an employee engagement program.
For example, one of the partners may have wished to start some benefits for employees to boost up their motivation and may have suggested investment of some amount for the same. Let’s say, the partner says that they will sign up for an hr tool that provides employee self-service so that employees can see what is happening across the company in real time and also engage with the other employees of the company.
Now, the other partner may not consider this to be fruitful and hence may not support such investment. So, the course of action remains incomplete and the team may have to satisfy some other reduced activities that may not be much beneficial.
3. The Barrier of Communication
Though transparency is something that most of the companies have made the main focus, communication still remains to be a major problem in situations such as employee engagement programs. In order to increase the amount of engagement among employees, a high amount of communication is also needed. But this gets a bit of difficult today when there are layers of information and hierarchy.
This can be seen through an example. The company head may have announced to get direct feedback from each employee in order to understand the needs of the company staff. But due to the hierarchy barrier, this information may not get passed to the employees of the lowest levels.
It may also happen that the team leaders or some of the managers may provide feedback on behalf of the workers in place of consulting them directly. So, of course, the actual engagement with the employees is not made here due to the communication barrier between the company head and the employees.
Apart from these three problems, there are many other issues that may creep up, ultimately failing employee engagement programs. Some other challenges that may come up are behaviors of the leaders, scattered teams, and many others.
Conclusion
Often companies try their best to offer a comfortable and welcoming work environment to its employees. Though they might have planned a lot many things, but these plans may not get executed in the right way or may not yield proper results. This mainly happens due to some of the common problems that happen to most of the employee engagement programs. Hence, when you are planning for an engagement program, it is also important to plan up proper strategies to avoid the loopholes.
