If you run a business or manage employees, you may be accustomed to the evaluations that can estimate how successful your workers are. You analyze people’s productivity, the quality of their work, or qualitative feedback from customers and co-workers to ascertain the value they bring to the company.

However, people don’t work in a vacuum. The environment, including policies and practices implemented by management, has a huge impact on how well employees function and make decisions, as well as if they stick around long enough to offer a return on investment. An unhealthy workplace can cause frustration, anxiety, anger, and other stress-induced behavior patterns, as well as increase the turnover rate and lower productivity.

To ensure that your organization is taking care of the people that spend around 30% of their waking hours working for you, an average of 1,734 hours a year, consider their wellbeing and engagement.

What is Wellbeing? 

Employee wellbeing is greater when needs are met and outside stressors are limited. According to Gallup, this means that their daily life and work experiences are fulfilling, their health and safety needs are met, they have meaningful relationships in their lives, they feel financially secure, and they are proud of and actively involved in a community.

Employees with good wellbeing enjoy better performance, lower rates of burnout, better health, are less likely to report feelings of stress, worry, and anxiety, and are typically more loyal to the company. Factors within a company’s control that affect employee wellbeing include if they’re being paid enough to live comfortably, if they have protections against getting sick and the resources to get better, if they have a work/life balance they can accept, and if management supports their healthy relationships with coworkers and addresses and prevents incidents of harassment and abuse.

What is Engagement?

Employee engagement is a way to measure how supported and valued an employee feels, often tying directly to performance outcomes including productivity, profitability and retention. Gallup identifies 12 elements of employee engagement that predict high team performance, including having set expectations and adequate resources, receiving regular praise and feedback, having a connection to the work and the company’s mission, making an impact at work, and having opportunities to learn and grow, among others.

Employees with good engagement are more productive and profitable and less likely to leave the organization, leading to stronger, long-lasting teams. The factors that affect employee wellbeing can vary and should be tailored to each employee, but company leadership should prioritize the integration of engagement efforts into the company’s culture.

Lessons from 2020 

The mass departure from offices in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused many people to work remotely for the first time. The increased sample size and mandatory nature of this transition, preventing self-selection bias, allowed for Gallup researchers to draw more objective conclusions about the effects that working remotely has on employees’ wellbeing and engagement and the different effects experienced by those who are working onsite. These conclusions are related in several ways to the age of respondents.

Some key takeaways include:

• Fewer onsite workers report high levels of wellbeing, but the difference is more pronounced for younger workers. Approximately the same percentage of Baby Boomers working onsite and remotely were thriving (57% onsite and 58% remote), but the divide was greater for Gen X (55% onsite and 59% remote) and Millennials (47% onsite and 54% remote).
• Remote workers report markedly more feelings of stress, anxiety and worry. This was especially pronounced in Millennials.
• In general, remote work is more engaging than onsite work. Engagement for onsite Millennials is low (30%), but remote Millennials have the highest recorded engagement Gallup had ever recorded from Millennials (41%). For both Gen X and Baby Boomers, 38% of remote workers were engaged in their work, just higher than the 33% of onsite Gen Xers and 35% of onsite Baby Boomers.

You may have noticed that, overall, younger workers have a lower rate of wellbeing and engagement. The advantage Baby Boomers have with employee engagement and wellbeing has to do with the greater opportunity they have had throughout their careers to establish financial and professional stability, as well as find a manager and position that engages them. These elements often come with time, with an added factor of luck and circumstance, but it’s important for managers to recognize the probability that Millennials don’t have the safety net that some older workers have been able to build.

To set employees up for success, we can learn from the differences found in remote and onsite workers. Below are some ideas to improve employee wellbeing and engagement that will help soothe employees’ worries, lesson stressors by offering a safety net, strengthen the bonds of your team, and allow them to focus on their work.

Ideas to Improve Employee Wellbeing

• Promote a healthy work/life balance. This includes limiting mandatory overtime and on-call time, and offering PTO and encouraging employees to take it.
• Pay your employees enough they can afford to pay for daily expenses and save for an emergency without taking a second job, which can pull energy away from their work at your organization.
• Offer good healthcare that allows employees to access preventative medicine, emergency care and mental health resources.
• Support healthy relationships between coworkers by setting up events for team bonding. Here’s what’s worked for our team while we’ve been working remotely.
• Defend your employees from harassment and abuse by acting immediately if transgressions occur. For more on this, check out the training programs offered by Kantola.

Ideas to Improve Employee Engagement

• Ensure employees have all the resources they need to do their jobs.
• Focus on clearly communicating expectations. Identify responsibilities, processes, and the standard you expect from their work as often as needed.
• Try to speak with each of your direct reports regularly. Especially in remote work situations, factor in some unstructured time to connect with employees on a more personal level, something you might have done by the office watercooler.
• Offer methods for growth, learning and advancement. The process of continuous development can be more valuable to a career than a single promotion, focusing effort on cultivating talents and strengths that will differentiate employees as they advance their careers.
• Offer plenty of public praise and private feedback. Create a recognition-rich culture and provide constructive and motivating advice to employees.
• Create situations where your employees can get to know each other and form personal friendships.
• Focus on improving your management style and don’t micro-manage, ignore feedback, or dismiss the opinions of your employees. Here are some management styles to aim for, as well as some to avoid.
• Communicate the impact that your employees’ work makes and align the missions of the company with employees’ roles and daily tasks.

How is your organization prioritizing employees’ wellbeing and engagement?