'Why Am I Here?' The Real Employee Engagement Question HR Needs to Be Asking

Excerpt from the original article in HRD Magazine authored by Stacy Thomas:

Employee engagement trends and catchphrases are ever on the rise, yet talent retention is a challenge that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Even with all the data available that points to increased employee connection as the answer to quiet-quitting and disengaged employees, employers still struggle to hire and hold on to talent.

With a new upcoming book, award-winning author and speaker on workplace psychology Jennifer Moss is working on filling in that knowledge gap and helping HR leaders with strategies to solve the disengagement problem.

A major problem, Moss told HRD, is that employees have not yet had a chance to heal from the shared existential threat of the global pandemic.

“Leaders are sort of looking to move on,” she said. “There's been some great things that have happened – flexibility and remote work and more conversations around mental health in the workplace, destigmatizing burnout … huge investments made in mental health and wellbeing, but we're still feeling like they're not being actualized at work.”

Cont…

Workplace happiness is not a luxury anymore, it’s a demand

Moss’s new book is the answer to the questions her first two books – on burnout and workplace happiness – raised; it’s been identified that burnout and workplace happiness are crucial elements of an engaged workforce, and the data gives the evidence. But employers still lag behind in implementing what’s been learned since the pandemic.

Citing current MIT Sloan School of Management research that revealed that happiness and health at work are deciding factors for employees making crucial decisions such as whether or not to work at or stay at an organization, Moss’s book explains that employers and HR need to address this issue or risk losing valuable talent.

“The book really is to help leaders understand that there are these very fundamental important pro-social traits that we need to be adopting within our cultures, to move the needle and to give employees time to heal,” Moss said.

Read the complete article via the link below.