21: Employee Engagement

learners. And that's true. That's a really important part of employee engagement is making sure that when an employee has to sit through training, it gives them the necessary tools that they need to do their job. And that it's not a page turner and incredibly boring. But employee engagement at the organizational level,

encompasses so much more. We're talking career growth, workplace culture, your employees wellness benefits, compensation, the relationships between peers, relationships between leadership and individual contributors, and just generally how employees are recognized for different things. So if all these things encompass the employee engagement experience, how can we as the Learning and Development Team touch these different areas, first of all, is career growth.

So in learning and development, we have this unique opportunity, where we can provide professional development opportunities that make it possible for employees to grow

beyond their role. If you have a leadership development program, or if you have skills training, or if you have opportunities to partner with local institutions for professional development, if there's a graduate school or business school in your area, they may have programs where it's designed specifically to interact with your organization and partner with them and provide your employees some of those skills to reach the next level. As far as your workplace

is culture. Here's something where as learning and development professionals, we are in the midst of a ton of training on diversity, equity, and inclusion right now, we are outsourcing it or we are researching it, or we are creating training, creating content, creating modules, creating a plan, creating

communication around that. And we're really, we're really in the position that we're in a lot of times in our organizations where we're on the front end of a big change that's coming because we provide the training. And when we are in those opportunities as learning and development professionals, we really have the opportunity to

be a change agent. And so as far as workplace culture is concerned, we have a unique opportunity to not only help educate our organizations about D and I, but we also are able to educate them about the difference between a culture fit and a culture AB. I've talked about this a little bit before in different forums, but I'm a really big fan of the culture add instead of the culture fit.

You know, you used to talk about the interview process and hiring new people as we want to find someone who's a culture fit. Which means that they have the same values as the organization, which is a good idea in theory. But I always, ever since I found out about culture ad I've always challenged people to go beyond culture fit. So yes, they they're not in direct opposition to the values that you have as an organization, but there's something extra there. There's something that they bring to the

table that others don't. And whether it is because they are diverse in some way. Whether it is because they have a skill set that you weren't quite expecting or a background that you weren't quite expecting. It's a really unique and great opportunity to teach your company about culture add and Dei. Additionally, when you create training materials, just Across the board, you have the opportunity to be both a brand and a culture ambassador for

your organization. So everything that you create in your learning and development department that is being experienced by the people in your organization should align with your organizational values, and it should align with your organizational brand. And that creates, that helps to create the foundation of a workplace

culture. If everything every course that I take as a new hire, is branded, just even in the colors, and with the logo of my organization, I'm more likely to kind of understand that vibe and understand that brand. And it helps to really solidify what that workplaces culture is for me as a new employee. And who would have thought that learning and development could could do something like that, right. As far as employee wellness, and benefits and rewards, it's kind

of typically hrs area. And if your learning and development function is under HR, which some are smart, it just depends on the company. What are the things that you can really do to support even if you aren't under HR, is to just make sure that everyone in your organization is well educated about what you offer. A lot of times if there are mental health benefits, or gym membership benefits, or gym membership, discount benefits or tuition reimbursement benefits.

A lot of times these may not be publicized to employees, or they might be part of the information overload that happens when you're first hired, and then they're not really talked about again. So as a learning and development function, it's our responsibility to make sure that our employees are consistently updated and made aware of the different benefits that are offered so that they can then take advantage of those

different benefits. As far as compensation, you might think that learning and development professionals don't really have an impact on compensation. However, in an indirect way we kind of can write, if we have those professional development opportunities that I mentioned before for career growth, if we have a leadership development program, if we have ways for our employees to increase their skills at their job, what we then do is help them increase

performance. One of the things that we are responsible for is performance improvement at our organizations, our learning solutions, or our training materials, or our courses. All of those different deliverables that we create as a learning and development team are then used to fill knowledge gaps, fill performance gaps, and really move the needle of the performance of our organization, as well as the performance of

our individuals. And if we're successful at helping our individuals perform better. Performance is often tied to compensation. So if we are helping to move that performance needle, we are then helping those employees be able to ask for that raise or be able to have a performance review at the end of the year that results in a merit increase, right. What about relationships, relationships are very important

in organizations. And a company that has career growth, workplace culture, employee benefits, great compensation, but has bad relationships between management and individual contributors. The employees are not going to be

engaged. Because no, no amount of money at least for me, some people might be a little bit more impervious to this, but at least for me, no amount of money is going to make me want to stay at a place where I have bad manager who cannot communicate with me, who cannot communicate expectations who cannot communicate difficult conversations who can't help me prioritize who can't help me navigate situations where I'm unsure what I'm supposed to do.

I need support. Right As an employee, I need support, I need guidance, I need, you know, recognition and a good attitude from from leaders within the organization. And one of the biggest ways that the l&d function can contribute to that is with a leadership development program. Many times you'll see in different organizations that new managers may have some support. And, you know, director level and above might be able to attend different conferences or programs or things that help

them with leadership. And a lot of times, kind of the mid career managers are forgotten about a little bit. And it's a perfect time for them to kind of get get settled into their ways. If you're not offering them continuous opportunities for growth, it can be really difficult to, to find those on your own, especially if you are a busy manager, especially if you have a large team, you may not have the time to pursue those opportunities on your own.

So as a learning and development function, we can really support leadership development throughout our organization and really help some of those relationships because not only is it going to help a leader be able to improve their relationship with their individual contributors. But it's also going to give them the tools to be able to recognize if there's problems between peers and help those conversations along if there's problems with work or performance and help

those conversations along. And, you know, training your leaders is going to make your whole organization better, including employee engagement. Last, but certainly not least, is recognition. This is one of the most overlooked parts of company culture, in my opinion, in my personal opinion, is recognition. recognition for a job well done, that doesn't have to be monetary, that's the best part. It doesn't have to be

monetary. As the Learning and Development function, you can sponsor employee engagement events. In fact, it's pretty common, especially if you have an organizational development specialist of some sort on your team. It's pretty common for learning and development teams to sponsor those types of events. And I've also never been at an organization where, when the Learning and Development function offers to sponsor an employee engagement event, people are like, Oh, that sounds

terrible. You know, most, most of the time, if you volunteer to sponsor an event to help employee engagement, people are pretty open to that idea. And depending on what you're, you're suggesting, right. And there are some really simple, easy, even free ways to create an event that helps your employees feel more engaged, especially if your team is remote. A lot of teams are still remote right now. And a lot of people felt a disconnect not being in the office. What can you do to to

bridge that gap? Well, few, a few different things. at a low cost, you could sponsor a trivia afternoon. Depending on the size of your organization, these suggestions might be better in your department, or your division. Or if you work for a very small organization, you might be able to swing it with your whole company. But you could do a trivia

afternoon. Say okay, instead of releasing at our normal time, at four o'clock, or five instead of releasing at our normal time of five o'clock today, we're going to let everyone go at four o'clock. But caveat is you have to come to the trivia trivia game. And you can ask some really fun trivia questions. But you can also pepper in questions about Your company's history or your company's culture or people, well known people, your C suite in your company. And it's a really fun way to get

people engaged. If you have a budget, you can get a prize, you can have people compete on teams, you can use breakout rooms and zoom to, you know, work it out, there are a lot of templates out there on the internet for how to conduct virtual trivia. And I would encourage you to just start

there. You could also do, just kind of a communication appreciation, set of posts or, or, you know, if you have social media that your company uses, you can kind of plan a series of events like an Employee Appreciation Week, or something where it's just, you know, maybe you spend a day, during the week, each day, you're highlighting a different employee who's done a good job. And you're thinking a different department via your social media. People love that. Right? Just saying thank you makes a

person feel so appreciated. If your company's LinkedIn, for example, if you use that for networking, if your company's LinkedIn gives a shout out to your marketing department, or if your company's Facebook, even better, right? If your company's Facebook gives a shout out to the marketing department. And you're a copywriter in the marketing department. Now you get to reshare that and say, Look, Mom, by company said I'm

doing a great job, right. And it's just like a little accolade that doesn't cost money that you can then share with your network. And there are so many other ideas. If you have a budget, there are, I believe there are like virtual escape rooms now. And some of the more like traditional team building activities that you can do, you can do a happy hour virtual or a coffee hour virtual. And, you know, again, if the learning and development team offers to

sponsor it. A lot of times, you'll get that buy in because a lot of times with these events, it's that no one has the time to do them. Right. When your employees are engaged, they're more likely to succeed. They're more likely to grow, they're more likely to find that intrinsic motivation to do a

really good job. A lot of times we talk on the podcast about instructional design, learning, design, teaching, you know, training, things like that, that are very specific, but I wanted to zoom out for a little bit and talk about organizational culture, and talk about our friends and our co workers who are just tired and working from home and working long hours and how we can really, as a learning and development function kind of helped contribute to the bottom line. Thanks again for joining

me on the blog. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and review us on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you'll tune in again soon.