Employee engagement is a tough nut for any business to crack. Failure to adapt to employees' career expectations or to ease their sense of being overwhelmed — by work demands, by constant technology distractions or by the disappearance of work/life balance — can drag down more than engagement. Performance and profitability suffer, too.
Those problems won't work themselves out, of course. A solution lies in creating what Josh Bersin, founder of talent management consulting firm Bersin by Deloitte, calls an "irresistible workplace." The concept stems from research conducted for the Deloitte 2014 Human Capital Trends Study. Bersin says the research identified two fundamental changes that has altered the relationship between employees and employers:
- The significant, ongoing employee engagement problem that businesses struggle to solve. Business leaders struggle to pinpoint the specific problems, though, partly because Millennials are flooding into the workforce with different expectations than pervious generations.
- Employees are now inundated with so much information and technological distractions that they feel overwhelmed.
"We have so much technology that’s infiltrated our lives that the barriers between work and life have disappeared, so many employees feel that they are just overwhelmed by the pace and the volume of activity that they’re dealing with at work," Bersin says. "It’s created a real engagement crisis."
The good news for business leaders? There’s hope. Watch Bersin's interview below with our irresistible friend Bill Kutik, veteran technology columnist for Human Resource Executive, about what the "irresistible workplace" entails, and why it's crucial to talent management.
