From quiet quitters to dynamic doers

Did you know that a whopping 85% of employees aren’t fully engaged with their work? Over two-thirds of these employees would be considered ‘quiet quitters’ - in other words, employees who show up and do the bare minimum with no real enthusiasm for their roles. The remaining third are ‘actively disengaged’, meaning they’re likely to be looking elsewhere or planning their escape route.

Employee engagement is a vital tool when it comes to reversing the quiet quitting trend, and has a huge impact on overall business success. Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their current employer, along with being more collaborative, productive and happier. All this contributes to better ROI and a boosted bottom line, so everyone wins.

But hybrid and remote work have had a major impact on the way companies keep employees engaged. The way we view employee engagement and company culture has had to pivot rapidly to accommodate remote work and increasingly global, diverse teams - that office beer fridge or impromptu lunchtime Mario Kart tournaments just aren’t the same when many people work from home, so what can you do to drive employee engagement no matter where your workforce is based?

Engagement throughout the employee lifecycle

Often when we think about employee engagement, we limit our thinking to the middle of the employee lifecycle - when employees are already established in their roles, and how we can retain them. But there’s actually a lot more we could be doing at both ends of the lifecycle - from the recruitment process through to the sad day an employee leaves the company.

A great onboarding experience ensures that 69% of employees stay at a company for at least three years. In addition, companies with a clear offboarding process have 11% more engaged employees than those without, while disengaged employees are 71% less likely to promote the company as a great place to work, showing that it really does pay to consider the entire employee lifecycle.

Each stage of the lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, development, day-to-day work and offboarding, presents a unique opportunity to boost employee engagement, whether that’s getting a new joiner excited about their first day or sending off a long-standing employee with nothing but positive memories.

How Greystar engaged new starters from day one

International real estate firm Greystar created COMPASS, an interactive learning tool which supports new joiners as they onboard and get integrated. The tool is fully integrated into the Greystar Business School, based on 5app, ensuring a seamless user experience, and contains all the useful learning content and information needed for a new joiner to become operationally effective and culturally aware in the shortest possible time.

Cohesion, clarity and community through comms

Great comms are pivotal in capturing the attention and imagination of your workforce, while ineffective comms will actively damage your engagement efforts. 

Open, transparent comms between leadership and employees are key for building trust and engagement across your business. A staggering 97% of employees believe that workplace communication affects their day-to-day tasks, so it really does pay to get it right (and costs to get it wrong)! In fact, effective communication has encouraged 54% of workers to stick around at their company for longer than they planned, meaning you can reduce employee attrition with a sense of cohesion, clarity and community.

For Greystar, channelling top-notch collaboration and comms was key to the successful, speedy launch of its Marketing Academy - one of its many learning academies within the Greystar Business School. There was a huge amount of internal enthusiasm and lots of ideas, but impatience to launch the learning academy. A commitment to consistent, regular communications with the relevant stakeholders and SMEs ensured that Greystar’s Marketing Academy has already had a significant impact on the business.

Adding learning into the mix

Investing in employee development is a way to show your employees you’re invested in them as people - especially if it’s part of each employee’s regular check-ins with their managers.

One of the main areas employees say they’re lacking is a clear understanding of their company’s values and goals. Providing quick, easily accessible learning about what your company stands for will help everyone feel more aligned and engaged with your mission. Put this somewhere prominent on your learning and comms platform so long-standing employees can refresh their knowledge, and don’t forget to include it in your onboarding playlist to get your new starters aligned right off the bat.

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Providing personalised, highly relevant learning is key to securing that all-important engagement. Greystar’s learning academies do just this - they pull together content around a specific topic, whether that’s a role, job function or location, meaning anyone accessing each academy finds everything they need and nothing they don’t, making their work lives much easier. 

A staggering 91% of Greystar’s employees engage with its Greystar Business School every month, so clearly they’re doing something right!