The leadership communication today is embracing diversity and inclusion to strengthen the sense of belonging among employees, as a part of the employee engagement strategies. Each year fresh initiatives are infused into team building activities due to new employee engagement trends commanding transformations in the workplace. These transformations happen from the fluctuating nature of the business climate that makes it hard to hold on to everything that could influence your company’s success. In this whirlpool of changes stand your employees. If there is anything that these changes have taught us is the change in workplace culture that proritizes the well-being of employees. Here is a list of top employee engagement trends 2024 that could reshape the way a business is run for the coming years.

Emotional Leadership

One change that can be widely seen among companies today is that there is a growing focus on embracing the employee experience and priorities. Now, leaders are starting to see employee well-being including their physical and mental health as key drivers to effective employee engagement strategies. This effect is due to the change in lifestyle caused by uncertain times, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic which taught people how to survive in threatening conditions. Now, we can see leaders increasingly emphasizing on building a connection among everyone in the team, especially remote workers, to establish a sense of belonging. Emotional support has become a part of the leader’s priority and not limited to technical support alone. They now feel that creating human connections on a personal level will lead to a much stronger workforce and better engagement among employees. Like it’s commonly said today, when you adapt a company culture that fits your employees’ needs, you will not only have a high retention rate but attract high performers as well. All this comes down to empathy being an important factor in running a business today.

The next trend also sprung out due to the lifestyle change caused by the pandemic.

Making Work Flexible

To survive the impact, organizations began to quickly adapt remote or hybrid working model, ensuring safety and that the work is carried out with as minimal disruptions as possible. This opened up an opportunity for employees to embrace a better balance between their work life and family life. But when the companies started to call back their employees to the office, the perceptions began to change. After returning, many employees started showing stress caused by increased workloads, unclear expectations and inadequate flexibility. This decreased the engagement levels, while increasing burnouts, putting at risk the success of the business. To ensure that the organizations do not end up becoming one of those figures in the negative employee engagement trends, leaders started to consider flexible work schedule or work-from-home options. It did not matter where the place of work was being carried out, but all that did was to ensure productivity and with that their engagement as well.

Take the words of Raja Lakshmipathy, Managing Director-India, Genesys, “the focus is more on engagement than efficiency, which was the case before”, during a recent interaction with CEO Insights India magazine.

Lakshmipathy recalls, “the focus was more about efficiency, it became the key to staffing, planning, forecasting, how many agents are required regarding the call flow”.

 

“But as we moved to the second stage, workforce optmizatiion (WFO) became the priority centering quality management, compliance, how do we take feedback and voice of customers among others”, he denoted.

Personalizing the Employee Engagement

Getting stuck doing tedious tasks has become a common sight in the workplace, resulting in a negative mark in the employee satisfaction levels. Focusing on these tasks often takes the time away from working on demanding, specialized tasks and leaving employees feeling overburdened. Tedious tasks could risk the employee productivity rate, making them feel bored, disengaged and distracted from performing repetitive or monotonous tasks. To mitigate this, leaders started to provide the right help to employees at the right time, to keep those employee satisfaction levels high.

Coming from years worth of experience, Lakshmipathy listed out a few initiatives seeing positive impact on employee satisfaction levels from his observations.

“Once we optimized, the third step was more towards employee or workforce engagement management”, added Lakshmipathy.

He believes, “By engaging employees through coaching, performance management and how do we create a personalized learning for the agent through gamification enhances the employee or workforce engagement management”.

Encouraging Continuous Learning

Leaders are constantly investing in employee development and education to improvise the employee engagement. When there are opportunities for growth and expansion in their careers, employees are more likely to show commitment and involvement in their work. How this can be done is very much evident after the emergence of Generative AI. Leaders have seen to it to deploy Gen AI to modernize the service desk to encourage continuous learning and development among employees. With endless access to training sessions and a plethora of courses to learn from, employees are able to stay informed of the latest happenings and be the competitor to their company’s competitors. Now, added with an essence of appreciation, leaders help employees feel recognized for their work and motivated to do better than ever.

Innovations Driving the Employee Engagement

As aforementioned, leaders have sought the need to rely on generative AI for its capabilities in not only continuous learning, but in the solving of employee support issues as well. This is observed to be done through the implementation of a modern service desk powered by generative AI and machine (ML) that elevates employee engagement by providing the right support, automatic resolving of queries and automating repetitive tasks. Besides, leaders are seen to  help their employees to derive accurate and consistent information, resulting in minimal human errors which tend to happen during information search. Plus the availability of round-the-clock information, makes it helpful for their employees to access information regardless of the time and without having to wait on human support. This is thanks to generative AI tools’ ability to understand the needs of the employee and provide personalized responses once it has become familiar from the previous interactions and preferences. Also, we can see a lot of leaders implement digital platforms for employees to engage in discussion, suggestions and sharing opinions thanks to the latest communication techniques which are present in these platforms.

Inclusivity in Diversity

We can see diversity and inclusion becoming a reliable factor to improve employee engagement in today’s business landscape. Leaders are increasingly working towards having a diverse, fair workplace culture, seeing to it that it blends well to have an engaged and innovative workforce. Leaders feel that having a blend of diverse backgrounds and experiences, brings in fresh perspectives to the table. But it is said that focusing on diversity alone will not cut it, but rather, leaders have come to realize that inclusion is what fuels the power. Leaders are making sure to make every employee feel belonged and that they are treated just as equally as their co-workers.