Behind every successful business stands an array of highly collaborative and engaged employees. This has become evident in the Covid era when the perspective of work and the workplace has changed forever.
Effective leaders can recognize their employees’ needs, offering remote and hybrid work arrangements and providing advanced digital tools like video conferencing, project management platforms, and software for employee monitoring to ensure seamless team collaboration and high productivity rates.
But if you want your employees to stay loyal to the company in these volatile times of the Great Resignation and a looming recession you need to make sure they are satisfied with their jobs and can clearly see their future in your company. One of the ways to achieve this is to keep investing in your employees offering quality training and frequent, well-informed feedback. These steps may make your employees more engaged, skilled, and confident to navigate your business through any crisis that may emerge in the near future.
Feedback
Many businesses are putting their hiring plans and forecasts on hold, being cautious, and wanting to cut expenses in times of crisis. At the same time, job insecurity and decreased resources can make employees feel demotivated and less engaged in their work.
If you want to prevent this scenario from happening, offer your employees frequent feedback making this your standard practice. The Harvard Business Review research shows that well-informed positive feedback can significantly increase employee happiness and engagement, with 72% of employees stating that performance evaluations are the most effective in boosting engagement.
If you want your employees to focus on their goals and achievements, offer them detailed, objective feedback based on software for employee monitoring data. These productivity and time tracking records will show you and your employees what tasks and projects they spent the most time on, using different apps and websites daily. Your employees will become more motivated and engaged knowing what steps they need to take to improve their performance and complete set goals.
More importantly, you can use feedback to highlight their achievements and reward hard work. This recognition can do wonders for employee satisfaction, showing your team members that you care about their professional growth and well-being.
Future Leaders
A crisis can make or break your business. The same goes for leaders. Top performers and talent can transform into leaders during a crisis if you focus on performance management, training, and succession planning.
Succession planning is a process of recognizing and investing in potential leaders within your teams that can make your company resilient to the negative effects of the Great Resignation. If you are still reluctant about investing in the future leaders within your company, look at the facts. The statistic shows that it takes over 90 days to complete a hiring process for a skilled professional.
The question is whether your company can afford to be without a highly skilled worker in a critical position for three months?
Luckily, if you create an effective succession plan you won’t have to worry about this issue.
The bottom line is that by investing in quality leadership training and following the succession plan, you’ll grow the next generation of your company leaders prepared for various challenges that may come their way.
Retention
It’s understandable that retention might not be your top priority during the recession when you need to think about numerous burning issues like budget, change management, and keeping employee motivation high.
You may think that employees are less likely to change jobs during a recession and that your retention rates won’t drop. But even though this notion makes sense, you should keep up with good practices that focus on employee well-being and engagement to make sure you stay ahead of the competition once the troubled times are over.
What’s more, investing in your employee performance and development during hard times can be more than an effective recommendation for your future employees once you start hiring again, doing wonders for your brand reputation.
Final Words
A crisis may be challenging but it can’t last forever. While crisis management requires making some decisive moves and abandoning effective practices, you still need to think of a way to keep your employees engaged and motivated during the hard times.
The key is in providing frequent, clear, and detailed feedback, sufficient training opportunities, and focus on employee satisfaction and well-being. The good news is that you don’t have to go through all of this alone.
If you deploy efficient software for employee monitoring into your workflow, you’ll make the entire performance management process easier by gaining in-depth insight into your employees’ daily activities, helping them boost their productivity, and recognizing their achievements.