The importance of employee engagement

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According to Gallup’s recent annual report, State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report, there is a ‘global rise in employees who are thriving at work, even as worker stress remains at a record high’. However, it also reports that, although employee engagement is rising, the majority of the world’s workers are still quiet quitting. There is an estimated 59% of employees falling into this category. Something needs to be done to address this, as in today’s environment of skills shortages, retention is generally better than recruitment.

What is quiet quitting?

Quiet quitters are your employees that are showing up for work physically but are not actually engaged with their role or the company that they are working for. Their feelings of disconnection with the business are more likely to lead to burn out and stress than more engaged employees, despite their productivity being much lower.

How do you reengage the quiet quitters?

As you well know, your investment into retaining your existing staff is money much better spent than in recruiting new team members. But do you know what things are most important to your team?   One area which needs to be considered is how your team is managed. This is particularly important if some, or all, of your team are working remotely or in a hybrid arrangement. Each member of your team needs the same level of appreciation, collaboration and support.

Culture, pay and wellbeing

Within the report, the three areas that employees are keen to see addressed are those of culture (or engagement), pay and wellbeing. While pay may be harder to address in the current climate, it is vital that you get the other two areas right. These can be as easy as ensuring that simple measures, such as regular meetings and encouraging people to move around more during the working day are in place, through to more structured culture and wellbeing programmes.  Key members of your team might also benefit from the introduction of coaching or other training programmes.

If you would like to discuss these opportunities, contact Career Evolution or visit the website today to find out how this could make a difference within your workplace.

Leaving a positive impression

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When an employee leaves a role, it’s a big change for everyone – both for the employee themselves and their employer. For the employee, if it is something they haven’t planned, then it will be outplacement that will help to ease the process. For the employer, it might be that the change has been forced upon them and they want to handle the situation as sympathetically and smoothly as possible. Although the change might not be something either party wants, it needs to be a favourable outcome for both of them.

Positive steps

Outplacement plays in important part in supporting people leaving a role, providing them with a positive experience of something that can feel quite negative. In this way, even someone leaving a role that they didn’t necessarily want to can still feel positive about the company. They will be able to provide positive references about the business in the future. If the decision has not been the individual’s personal choice, it can take some reconciling in their own mind. If you leave with unresolved differences and issues, then it’s very difficult to view a former employer in a positive light. However, outplacement and talking to professionals who can offer tangible solutions, is a way of taking positive steps in the right direction.

 Impacts of change

I’ve talked a lot in the past about the emotional impacts of change and how these can affect our personal and working lives. A change in one part of our lives often has a knock-on effect elsewhere. A major change at home can disrupt working lives, and equally a change at work can disrupt all aspects of our personal lives. This can be especially true if your job and working arrangements are finely balanced around wider commitments, for example caring for young children or elderly parents. It’s important not to allow your sense of direction during such transitionary periods to veer off track.

Building resilience

At Career Evolution, we can help employees move to a more positive place mentally and our key objective is to get them back in control of their own situation and future. We also encourage building resilience in such times and talking to someone familiar with the impacts of change can help with that. Preparedness too, of such things as CVs and interview techniques, can help going forward. When someone looks back at their transition between jobs, it’s important not to dwell on the negative aspects, but look forward at the positive ways that change has impacted them.

If you would like to talk to someone about providing outplacement support, then please get in touch with us today.

AI and the future

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the demise of human civilisation and the rise of the robots. Okay, I may be exaggerating there a bit, but there has been a great deal of conversation around AI and the impact it is having – and will have – on human productivity and employment. In this blog I’m looking at how AI is leading to greater automation, but the human voice will also continue to be important.

Intelligent thinking

AI has developed in all kinds of interesting ways over the last few decades and advanced immensely in the 21st century.  From the dawn of computers people have been asking how far their intelligence can reach and if these machines can learn processes and behaviours. AI research was begun in 1956 at Dartmouth College in America and these pioneers became the leaders in AI research for decades. Many of them predicted that a machine as intelligent as a human being would exist in no more than a generation and they were heavily funded, to the tune of millions of dollars. But it later became apparent that they had massively underestimated the complexity of the project. Research and development petered out in the 1980s, due to funding shortfalls, but as technology hugely advanced, investment and interest in AI boomed in the first decades of the 21st century. During this period, machine learning was successfully applied to many problems in academia and industry. Automation is now being applied to all aspects of productivity, from manufacturing to service industries and retail.

Artificial creativity?

AI learning is also being talked about as able to creatively write about subjects from a point of knowledge. There is even talk of AI replacing human beings in fields that rely on writing skills, such as web design, journalism or marketing. The old joke about the Infinite Monkey Theorem now doesn’t seem so far from the truth. If a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any existing text – including the complete works of William Shakespeare – then surely artificial intelligence can learn to do this using processes and algorithms. But can they replicate imagination? Can they add soul and emotion? And can they recreate a human’s written ‘voice’.

The human touch

When it comes down to it, there really isn’t any substitute for the personal touch. It’s not only the human interaction that is completely lost if you are dealing with a machine – be it paying for goods in a supermarket or talking to your energy provider by telephone. There really is no substitute for just talking to someone, if you are trying to sort out a problem. And the more automated services become, the less interaction people will have in a society that is already increasingly isolated and remote. Aspects such as working from home are great in some respects, but less so in others. The massive reduction in person-to-person interaction will be further impacted by even more automation at work and in our personal lives.

It’s not all bad news, as greater automation does offer the potential to enhance people’s jobs too. Automation in many industries can make a huge difference to productivity and efficiency, and there are many positives to be gained from progress in AI – particularly in the health and science sectors, where there have been huge advancements in research and treatment. But it’s always worth retaining that human touch too, especially in our human resource sector. There really is no substitute for an in-person, one-to-one conversation – you just don’t the same sense of personality and vibes from someone, if you’re talking to a machine.

WELCOME TO OUR LATEST VLOG

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Welcome to the latest vlog from Career Evolution!

We are continuing to share weekly advice and updates from the industry on outplacement, career management, and coaching.

In our latest vlog, our director, Sue Thomas, rounds up some of our posts from June, including the number of names in her role as an outplacement consultant and supporting her son through LinkedIn connections.

Watch the video below:

Looking after the talent

Recognising talent is one of the key attributes of any successful company. A good manager will be able to identify talent when they see it and acknowledge the importance of retaining that talent in the long term. Talent and skills can surface in different ways and if they occur naturally, then so much the better. Talent of course can also be engendered through advice and training too, so that the ‘raw materials’ of a person’s attributes can be enhanced and honed into something more effective and efficient. In this blog, I’ll be looking at talent management. What’s the best approach?

A holistic approach

There’s a school of thought that decrees that talent management, like many aspects of business management, needs a holistic approach. By that, I mean it needs lots of different approaches, to be looked at from a variety of angles. Talent management needs to be a joined-up process and also should be part of a wider business strategy. In this way, investment can be prioritised and resources allocated, as an integral part of growth and success. 

Talent spotting

Keeping on the lookout for talent is a key part of business management too. With platforms such as LinkedIn, it’s easy to connect with new people and ascertain their experience and suitability for your own business. It’s essential that when recognising potential, that you link it to performance and process. So that anyone you engage with and employ is rewarded for their commitment and achievements. Any business needs a mixture both of knowledge and experience, and modern thinking on the latest developments. There’s no point in having a seasoned, knowledgeable team that has no awareness about digital technology, such as social media or video sharing platforms. The phrase multitalented is often overused, but when it comes to creating an effective, successful business or team, it’s very apt.

A flair for business

A good manager will assign specific roles to the members who are most suitable for those roles. A flair for one aspect of a job – communication, for example – might mean that they are encouraged towards more outward facing aspects of the business. Identifying talent might be readily apparent or it may take time for it to emerge. Team members can each bring individual talents to mesh together and often a team environment will encourage staff to come out of their shells and into their own. The important thing to remember is to make sure you reward success, which in in turn will futureproof your business going forward.

Identifying and nurturing talent is a talent in itself. If you find that you are struggling to find or retain talent, it might be worth talking to one of our coaches. They can provide advice and guidance on what to look for as positive attributes in your staff and how to preserve that talent in the future.

 

 

A big shout out to the NHS

As the NHS celebrates its 75 years of service this Wednesday, we would like to acknowledge the incredible role it plays in the UK and play tribute to the people that work within it.

At Career Evolution, we have been fortunate to have carried out a number of career management and coaching projects with the NHS over the years. It has been a pleasure to work with such a range of extremely talented professionals in Primary Care Trusts and Integrated Care Boards – and even going back to the days of Clinical Commissioning Groups and Strategic Health Authorities.  Five years ago, we also supported the organisation at its 70th birthday conference in Manchester (pictured). The relationships we have forged go back over 20 years and through various restructures and throughout the country.

Well done NHS and here’s to the next 75 years!