Employees are now more engaged in their organisation’s activities, goals and benefits – but many businesses are unaware of the financial concerns of their staff, research suggests.
A snapshot poll carried out by specialist advisory firm Howden Employee Benefits & Wellbeing suggests that more than half (52%) of employers believe that employee engagement within their organisation had either improved slightly (36%) or significantly (16%) during one of the most difficult business environments in living memory.
The poll of nearly 200 senior HR professionals found that fewer than one in three employers (29%) thought that engagement had worsened during the same period.
Almost half of all employers questioned (47%) had seen no evidence of increased financial worries among their workforce since the beginning of the pandemic.
Steve Herbert, head of benefits strategy at Howden, said that employee engagement is often a “very difficult area to measure accurately, yet is a pivotal factor in maintaining and indeed improving output and productivity for employers in all sectors”.
He said: “It is particularly pleasing that engagement levels appear to have improved over the last few months, and that can only be a positive for UK employers as they face the dual challenges and uncertainties of a continuing pandemic and a new trading relationship with the European Union.”
Herbert said that the pandemic has been “a story of financial winners and losers”.
He said: “Many employees have effectively become enforced savers during the months of lockdown and are now significantly better-off than before the crisis.
“Yet the flip-side of that issue is that there are now millions of employees who have been existing on reduced salary for the best part of a year, and many more whose wider household income has dropped owing to a reduced income from a partner or family member.
“Employers are sometimes unaware of such concerns, yet financial stress is potentially damaging to health and wellbeing, relationships (both in and outside of work), and can also impact worker productivity too.”
Herbert said that employers can implement a number of financial wellbeing strategies to help to address the current situation.