Not only will having an engaged workforce help an organization keep its most valued employees, but it will also result in higher levels of productivity and radically impact the bottom line result.
What’s interesting about employee engagement though is how it differs dramatically between industries. This raises two important questions: Why do you need to improve your employee engagement? And what are the industry specific challenges associated with employee engagement?
A growing need
In some industries such as tech, where the average tenure is as low as 2 years, the need to retain talent is so crucial to success that coming up with new ways to engage your staff is one of the highest business priorities.
Whereas in retail, where traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are competing with both online giants and disrupter brands, ensuring stores that associates are providing the differentiated customer experience that will give the company a competitive edge is the biggest driver behind employee engagement.
Consensus amongst HR professionals has long been that traditional employee engagement programs are no longer fit for purpose. Whilst this may be true, there are industry specific constraints that mean taking new approaches to engagement is not always so straightforward.
Tailoring engagement to industry
If you look at the hospitality industry, launching a company-wide engagement initiative for a workforce that is both geographically dispersed, but also made up of seasonal workers who have no real connection to the company, is a challenge the majority of HR leaders need to tackle.
In traditional industries such as oil and gas, HR leaders must now evaluate forward-thinking engagement initiatives such as workplace flexibility in order to make up for the loss of trust felt amongst their workforce following several years of job losses during the industry downturn.
Whilst each industry may have unique reasons for, and challenges associated with, enhancing employee engagement, one thing they all have in common is that if done right, the impact on business success will be second to none.