How to improve engagement after redundancies

Has your company recently gone through a seismic organisational shift? It can be hard to improve engagement after redundancies.

Mergers, return to office and, of course, redundancies can negatively impact your employee engagement scores. Any change on this scale can be incredibly disruptive to employee engagement and happiness, no matter how HR and the executive board have prepared.

If your employee engagement survey results have dropped since the change, it’s probably time to ask whether anything on a macro-cultural level has gone wrong. If so, it is time to dig deeper to find where the true problem lies — and what can be done to turn it around.

In this article, we’ll explore different scenarios that can influence your employee experience, and offer a strategy to put things right, ensuring you keep your best people productive and happy.

How Change Impacts Employee Engagement

Mergers, Redundancies and Remote Work

Have you recently seen two newly merged teams clashing over how to work together? Is it because the hierarchy and lines of communication among them are unclear following the merger? Or are they struggling to adapt to new processes and expectations that aren’t what they were used to?

If you’ve recently had to make redundancies, your remaining employees might now be worried about their job security. After all, it’s hard to feel engaged in the workplace if you’re wondering whether you need to look for another job. On the other hand, a mass recruitment campaign might have left employees feeling like they were looked over for promotions and other career opportunities.

Or maybe in the new world of distributed remote working, your teams are simply feeling too disconnected from each other. Their relationships have become more transactional without the usual office natter, and they feel less appreciated because so much of their work has now become invisible to the others in their team.

These are all issues where HR can use its influence in the boardroom to inform senior leaders of the situation on the ground. They can also drive change on a systemic level.

Can Change Improve Employee Engagement?

Managers Are Key to Systemic Changes

Even when issues might have a macro-cultural cause, it’s important to not lose sight of the role of the manager. 70% of the variance in employee engagement is influenced solely by management, not by HR strategies, according to Gallup. While HR can be a driver on the systemic level, solutions to cultural issues will almost always require frontline managers to play a leading role. Let’s talk more about that.

Even when an employee engagement issue appears to be rooted in something systemic, it’s still likely that management will play a crucial role in addressing it. The change from in-person to remote work is a great example here.

There can be initiatives led by HR to break the problem of team disengagement. These include carving out time for a social call between team members at the start of the week.

But if employees feel like their manager is often withdrawn during these calls, concerned mostly with ending the call on time so that everyone can get on with work, the idea proposed by HR will only make things worse. It’ll reinforce the message that their managers don’t care about them as people. Additionally, they’ll become more disengaged with work as a result.

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Better Engagement: What is the Solution?

How to Ensure Success After Redundancies

For an HR initiative to succeed, managers have to help drive new rituals. Routines and habits as much as — if not more than — the top level of the organisation.

For a weekly social call to succeed, managers have to show that they care about what their team got up to at the weekend. Managers should take time to hear about wins or concerns they might have about work.

They have to also be enthusiastic about being part of that call themselves. Managers should appreciate that taking time for everyone to connect on a human level will ultimately help with more traditionally strategic matters, like productivity and ingenuity.

Taking Action is Easy with Mo’s Proven Strategies

Imagine that a frontline manager at your organisation has spotted a problem with employee engagement in their team and come up with a solution. More avenues to reward team members for invisible work will help. Or maybe everyone needs a better way to collaborate to feel like a cohesive team. Let’s move away from remote desks strung together by email threads.

Whatever the case, ask yourself how easy it is for that manager to action. Can they start setting things up themselves? Or do they have to pass a request up the chain and wait for somebody higher in the organisation to sort it out?

Mo Empowers Managers to Improve Employee Engagement

Around 70% of “layoff survivors” have reported that their motivation declined after a round of staff cuts, according to a recent study by BizReport. Cutting staff may help the bottom line. However, if the rest of your employees start to leave, the cost of replacing them may mitigate any benefits.

Another issue that affects “layoff survivors” is a sense of unease, leading to lower engagement and productivity. It is important to maintain a sense of belonging in your team, giving them a reason to feel accountable to hitting targets. It will also help you rescue any brand damaging stories that leak out after rounds of redundancies.

The key to all of these issues? Managers.

“The key to helping managers break through employee disengagement is to empower them to take action themselves.” That’s according to Luke Fisher, CEO of Mo. “If they feel the only difference they can make is by asking upwards or waiting for top-level directives to come down, they’ll lose heart and might stop trying.”

If managers feel like their actions are a key driver of change, they’ll feel more connected to their teams and more invested in their engagement.

Our culture and engagement platform uses data insights to drive real improvement in engagement scores while reducing staff turnover. We strategically help people teams create great places to work through continuous, positive action.

We turn your disconnected employees into engaged teams.

Learn more about our proven strategies

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement drives high performance.

Employee recognition solutions

Employee Recognition

Employee Recognition improves team connection.

Staff Rewards

Staff rewards and recognition drive performance.

Mo Improves Morale After Redundancies

Mo is a culture and engagement platform that uses data insights to drive real improvement in engagement scores while reducing staff turnover. We strategically help people teams create great places to work through continuous, positive action.

If you’re looking for ways to take action on measuring employee engagement, learn more about how to shift the dial at the manager level and transform insights into action. To find out if you’re eligible for our money-back guarantee, book a demo with our team.

Written by Alice Florence Orr

All Articles by Alice Florence Orr