Just 13% of employees in Europe are engaged with their work, according to Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workforce Report. 72% are ‘quiet quitting’, and the remaining 15% are actively disengaged. And the results for the UK are even more concerning, where just 10% of employees are actively engaged.
It’s no surprise that low engagement is not particularly good for business. Among other things, it brings a decrease in productivity, retention levels, and morale. Conversely, many studies have highlighted a direct correlation between high levels of employee engagement and greater business performance.
Thankfully, there’s an anecdote to this epidemic of disengagement….
Proactively re-connecting employees to their organisation’s purpose, strategy, and mission is one of the most effective ways to increase engagement.
But many of us already know this. In fact, ‘Engaging teams on purpose, strategy and values’ has been the top priority for internal communications and employee experience professionals for the last seven years. So, this blog post outlines the strategy and tactics behind the need to connect employees to the organisation’s purpose, strategy, and vision.
Let’s jump in.
3 Priorities for Connecting Employees to Purpose, Strategy, and Vision
If the connection between employees’ daily work and the company’s overarching purpose, strategy, and vision is such an important driver of engagement, internal communicators must think tactically about how to connect the dots and portray a consistent narrative.
There are three core priority areas to create this all-important alignment and connection –
We’ve considered each priority in a little more detail, and explored the actionable tactics that will get you on the road to an engaged and connected workforce…
1. Aligned Leadership
Let’s start with the fundamentals. Strategic alignment at the leadership level always has to come first. Effective internal communication is authentic and genuine, so you can’t expect employees to get behind something that the leadership team has not yet bought into.
When it comes to engaging employees with your organisation’s purpose, strategy, and vision, it’s critical that you build a consistent narrative throughout all of your leadership messaging.
Employees need to receive an aligned message from different leaders throughout the company in order to truly understand and feel a genuine connection to the strategic direction. Whether it’s a reference to the organisation’s purpose as part of the introduction to a departmental All Hands, a quarterly strategy update email from the CEO or the COO running an Ask Me Anything session about the long-term vision, every opportunity to embed the strategy at leadership-level is incredibly valuable.
Tactically, Viva Engage offers the perfect platform upon which to facilitate open conversations between leadership and employees for organisations using M365. It also provides the functionality to host virtual All Hands and Q&A sessions, saving time, improving the employee experience, and reducing the admin burden.
2. Consistent Internal Messaging
It goes without saying that you need to communicate your organisation’s purpose, strategy, and vision clearly and frequently.
But we don’t just mean having a page on your intranet or a statement within your careers portal. We mean weaving strategic messaging into everyday communications, building your content strategy around your corporate values, and sharing stories about how your company’s purpose is being brought to life.
It’s all about translating the corporate strategy into an engaging story that your employees feel proud of, and understand well enough to repeat to friends and family members.
At a practical level, this might mean tagging each news post to a corporate value, as we built into the Met Office’s award-winning SharePoint intranet using a custom web part. Or using Viva Connections to aggregate strategy updates from right across your digital workspace, helping keep frontline employees in the know. Or even by making use of Viva Amplify to share a consistent narrative via multiple channels that targets different audiences with ease.
3. Transparent Goals and Objectives
Specifically aligning your employees’ focus with business outcomes can directly drive performance as well as improve engagement. So ensuring that every single employee has goals that are clearly aligned with the organisation’s purpose, strategy, and vision is a key priority.
To make this possible for individual employees, it’s important to ensure transparency of goals and objectives throughout the company. At a company level, a departmental level, and right through to a team level. This kind of visibility allows employees to understand how their work connects to their company’s broader goals, bolstering their engagement and motivation.
This is your opportunity to spotlight the “why” behind employees’ daily work and demonstrate how they’re a vital part of the picture.
For organisations using M365, Viva Goals is a ready-made platform that gives every member of every team visibility of the company’s overall goals and the ability to see how their day-to-day work is driving results. While performance management would typically sit outside of IC’s realm of responsibility, the Viva Goals platform is a solid IC-ally due to its ‘Share an update’ feature and focus on transparency, alignment and engagement. And unlike other goal-setting software, it’s fully integrated with the broader M365 suite and brings goals into the flow of everyday work via an app in Teams.
Silicon Reef – your trusted partner for all things M365
Since 2016, we’ve helped our clients use Microsoft technology to make their workplaces more productive, more connected, and more engaging.
We are people-first M365 experts and SharePoint specialists. We build digital workplaces using Microsoft technology designed to deliver better employee experiences.
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