The rise in remote work and the blurring line between work life and home life have given way to more and more workers becoming overworked and overstressed while at the same time feeling less connected and productive in their work.
FREMONT, CA: Employee involvement is a timeless priority for every company and, when businesses are able to get it right, the positive effect is replicated through the entire enterprise. In the past, cultivating and maintaining employee engagement has been about ensuring that people in your company feel comfortable in their jobs, encouraged by their managers, and related to the priorities and vision of a company and doing all that inside the walls of your workplace. Although this has not changed, employee engagement must now be adapted to the most important shift in the workplace that has taken place in our generation: the global pandemic of COVID-19.
Not only has the pandemic changed workers' desire for protection and help from their employers, but it has also literally changed the definition of what the workplace looks like and feels like moving into the future. It is now up to the leaders to switch their employee engagement plans to take care of workers in this new world of work.
Some key employee engagement trends for 2021:
Remote Working
It would be difficult to speak about the current image of employee engagement without talking about remote work and the need for HR leaders to help workers who work from home. In the light of the pandemic, many businesses that have never had a remote work model-and even those that may have done so but never felt they needed to rely so heavily on it-were forced to uproot their in-office cultures and adapt to a fully distributed workforce. A total of estimated 16 million US knowledge employees began working remotely due to COVID-19 as of March 27; this figure is definitely much higher now.
Burnout
The rise in remote work and the blurring line between work life and home life have given way to more and more workers becoming overworked and overstressed while at the same time feeling less connected and productive in their work. This translates into employee burnout, which is a major employee engagement trend and a challenge for leaders to solve in 2021.
