Engaging Hospitality Employees

Business success is achieved by people. So, engaging your employees with their work, colleagues, business values and mission, and your unique ways of working is your most powerful tool for achieving your goals.

To avoid wasting time and money on Employee Engagement tactics that don’t actually make your business more profitable, Employee Engagement Surveys are a great way to inform data-driven decisions about your recruitment and succession strategies, performance and talent management, leadership and management, and customer service.

 

Combat Hospitality’s Recruitment Crisis

Unexpected events such as a pandemic jolt us out of our comfort zones and force many people to rethink their careers, which is both a challenge and an opportunity as hospitality businesses struggle to attract staff.

Employee Engagement surveys empower you to gather data on what attracts your current employees to their roles, enabling you to make data-driven decisions on how to attract future employees and retain current employees.

 

Confirm and Utilise This Past Year’s Lessons

Large-scale surveys have shown that 69% of employees feel generally positive about their employers’ pandemic response. Over the last 12 months, employers have listened and responded fast to introduce new ways of working, communicating, and performing. Finding out what has worked and what has not highlights what we should keep and what we need to reinvent. The critical learning here is not simply what employees like but what has created a tangible difference in staff and business performance.

 

An Excellent Reputation

Publicly communicating what you have done well through the pandemic helps you position yourself as a reputable business and employer. Being able to use data to report on engagement, such as the percentage of staff who believe your company has “exceptional health and safety measures for staff and customers” could be extremely beneficial for your reputation, while constructive responses can be used to better the organisation.

 

 

What should it look like?

Your survey doesn’t need to be lengthy, fancy, or resource-intensive; it just needs to provide you with meaningful results. Every company will have different requirements when it comes to measuring employee engagement, so it’s important to think carefully about what you want to measure, however there are some general rules you should use to shape your survey:

1. The anonymity offered by employee surveys can increase the likelihood that people will share their true feelings. Larger organisations may collect demographic data while keeping their survey anonymous, but smaller organisations must be careful to balance this or to emphasise confidentiality. Using an independent consultant to run the survey will further reassure confidentiality and impartiality.
2. Change is constant. The challenges and opportunities of one week may be forgotten the next, so implementing semi-regular pulse surveys can help you monitor engagement on an ongoing basis and respond quickly.
3. Benchmarks, such as Think People Consulting’s Northern Ireland Employee Engagement Benchmark Initiative, allow you to compare your results with other comparable organisations, providing further actionable insights.
4. It should be easy for employees to complete. Those who feel least engaged unfortunately are the least likely to participate. You can help to mitigate this by promoting your survey well in advance, promising action from its results, and keeping it short and relevant.
5. A segmented survey – which gathers essential demographic data while allowing respondents to remain anonymous – can provide valuable information to allow you to target your employee initiatives in a meaningful way. For example, you may have different employee engagement challenges and opportunities for different roles, genders, age groups, locations etc.
6. Focus on areas that are interesting to your employees such as safety, security, professional relationships, and personal purpose. This means that they are a) more likely to complete the survey and b) you are more likely to be able to introduce meaningful initiatives from the results and reinforce mutual trust and commitment with your employees.

 

 

Free Panel Discussion: Employee Engagement Post-Pandemic

with Think People Consulting, Norbrook & the Office of Government Procurement

In this session our guests shared their different experiences of understanding and retaining employee engagement through the last year and their plans for maintaining a listening culture to inform decisions about post-COVID working environments that build thriving work cultures and optimise engagement and wellbeing as we move forward.

We were joined by:

• Kathryn Whyte, Head of People and Culture, Office of Government Procurement
• Denise Collins, Human Resources Director, Norbrook
• Emer Hinphey, Managing Partner, Think People Consulting

On-Demand Online Event.

Access the panel recording here on our Events page.