Just before the pandemic, some HR positions have been renamed to „happiness manager“, since the key role of HR managers started focusing on overall employee satisfaction. How have the job positions changed during these two years and how can you support employee engagement in company culture regardless of them working from the office or home?
Changes in company benefits
Pre-pandemic times were filled with company events, massages right at the office, grill parties at the terrace/garden and more special happenings occasions during the year. Based on that, next to bureaucracy obligations, HR managers became internal event managers. These events are partially slowly returning to work life, but there are different company benefits that settled permanently in our lives and will not be cancelled.
We are talking about gift cads, salary bonuses for culture, sport or health boost and many more whose key functions are that they are not connected to the workspace. HR managers and employees, they all benefit from this change. HR managers don’t need to maintain the benefit and employees can choose from which option they benefit the most.
But these benefits create a new kind of problems – they decrease employee engagement in company culture. People don’t know each other and spend significantly less time together and these benefits make the problem even bigger. What can HR manager do about it? How to eliminate this negative impact?
Employees need to know that company cares
Based on the Dell Technologies study Gen Z: Future is coming, 38 percent of Zoomers want to work in the organisation that takes social and environmental problems seriously.*
% of Zoomers want to work in the organisation that takes social and environmental problems seriously
Company life and benefits need to be aligned with this discovery. Stop emphasizing flexible working time and regular home office as company benefits. This is a standard now and new generation (even though this consciousness already boomed with millennials) cares more about company culture, values and their approach to social responsibility and team management. And yes, even if they work from home.
We recommend organising CSR activities as part of working time or allowing employees to participate in volunteering activities on their workdays.
If a company reports some values, the main role model of their application should be the company owner, top management and HR department. Good example is the key, HR manager cannot ask colleagues to wear face masks at the office if he/she doesn’t do so him/herself. A reputation problem reflecting this logic has recently happened to Apple. They launched campaign about work flexibility and how their products help companies with giving their employees the flexibility they need. But at the same time, Apple asked their own employees to come back to their office desks in recent post-covid months.
People remember every injustice that happens to them and this will hurt the reputation of the employer for a very long time.
So how to communicate and magnify company values and life so employees can feel voluntarily engaged?
Simplify employee’s life, but increase the engagement
How to achieve that? The key problem comes with benefit distribution. News and also basics about benefits and company life should be properly communicated and made accessible in the simplest way.
TULIP – cloud for benefit and event management
Organising company benefits and events can be automated and simplified by moving these processes to the cloud platform.
TULIP’s benefit and event modules were designed by IT specialists in cooperation with HR specialists, so the modules serve perfectly for HR departments’ needs. The modules simplify management of benefits and events by solving the following problems:
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More available timeslots
This is applicable for office massages, group trainings or workshops with limited number of attendees. In TULIP, HR manager creates a list of available time slots and employees simply choose the ones to log in. If there are limits for the number of attendees, they can sign to a waiting list.
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More options for one benefit
Do you provide employees with variable benefit? Do they get an option to choose a benefit from the list while others are not available for the chosen time? This can also be solved in TULIP. There is a simple feature in the system which in case of variable benefits immediately deactivates other benefits after an employee chooses the one to use.
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Administration function for HR
HR department can fully control event categories, tags and the number of attendees. An employee sees available events and benefits directly in TULIP account and HR manager can work with real-time reports.
Do you want to manage company’s benefits and events in cloud? Let’s meet for a demo session!
Methods of measuring employees’ satisfaction
How can you measure employees’ satisfaction with various factors like job position, work tasks, company performance, values and more?
There are classic, old-school ways: regular satisfaction questionnaires and interviews. But this approach only evaluates employee’s subjective feeling and performance and no overall overview.
If the company requires overall employee satisfaction results, there are new ways of measurement.
Sociorating sets an international standard for measuring social conditions within organizations. The methodology enables benchmarking of organizations regardless of size and industrial sector. They use an online platform to measure the level of innovation, trust, identification, satisfaction and responsibility in organizations. SocioRating helps predict the long-term value of an organization, its sustainability and impact on society. More information about this method: https://www.sociorating.org/.
To summarize methods of increasing employee engagement:
- Provide benefits that are really required from employees
- Work and live by your declared values
- Implement CSR activities to working time
- Communicate company life via various channels and do so repeatedly
- Digitise company processes to the cloud
- Measure employees’ satisfaction, evaluate and work with collected data
Do you want to know how company benefits have changed by an influence of world pandemic? Download our e-book.
How company benefits have changed by an influence of world pandemic? What to expect for following years? We prepared almost 20 pages of an e-book where we will describe current situation in Slovakia and other European Union countries, provide statistics of benefits provided by companies, focus also on employees’ desires and we will briefly describe current Slovak legislation in that area. Subscribe for our newsletter and download “Employees‘ benefits after Covid pandemic” e-book.
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Email: sona.vyhonska@tulipize.com
Phone: +421 917 882 324
