Ways to Reduce Cost and Improve Employee Engagement

All businesses irrespective of their sizes have been under constant pressure in order to reduce cost & boost employee engagement during the pandemic. The HR professionals of the company have a challenging role to play in such situations as they directly represent the company and responsible for cost-cutting & boosting employee engagement.

The term ‘cost-cutting’, if it starts reflecting in the HR talks, can induce mental stress among employees. Improving employee engagement will become problematic for HR professionals in these circumstances. Here are some of the ways HR can smoothly handle cost-cutting & employee engagement at the same time.

Right Hiring Approach

Many companies put recruitment on hold while making cost-cutting. However, it is not mandatory for HR to stop recruiting new candidates at the time of cost-cut. Rather, HR can strictly review the recruitment process in order to make the best-fit candidates hired. Recruitment is only bad when the poor hiring approach is followed. So HR must ensure the candidates hired are the right job & cultural fit for the company in order to raise the employee engagement.

Automate HR Processes

Fast & smooth HR processes of the company form positivism in the workplace which turns to the increased employee engagement. It is generally observed that slow HR processes with manual interventions create an unnecessary hurdle between HR & employee. This directly impacts their workplace engagement as most of the time people take stress about leave approval, flexible hours, performance review and other HR processes. Making all these tasks automated will not only make them fast but also people-centric.

Prioritizing Training Programs

As far as the doors of learning & development are open in the company, employees love to be a part and work to perform better. So HR must consider providing training of new modules on a regular basis to employees remain engaged with the work. It automatically reduces the cost of the company in the long term as HR can consider promoting internal employees for multipurpose roles without hiring the new people. The companies investing in the training program for employees turn to increased satisfaction level which helps them boost productivity.

Conclusion

As an HR or employer, you must consider implementing the above steps for the overall benefit of company. To control the cost of learning & development, you can consider many virtual learning platforms for employees such as LinkedIn learning. Alternatively you can ask your high performers to create online notes, tutorials or videos to train their subordinates.