How belonging takes reward & recognition to the next level

When HR professionals discuss benefits and perks, you’ll often hear the term employee engagement used. The question is often, ‘how can we get our workforce more engaged with our benefits offer?’

But here at Amba, ’employee engagement’ makes us wince a little. As we see it, if employees need to be engaged, then they must already be disengaged. And we don’t want that.

From the get-go, we want employees to feel that they belong.

What is that sense of belonging, and how is it created? There was a time when on the first day of a new job, you walked in through the office door and were met by a friendly face keen to carry out an induction and settle you in.

If all went well, that personal touch meant the green shoots of belonging sprouted by day’s end. But now, we live in a more disconnected world. It’s not uncommon for interviews to be remote and then for a new employee to work mainly, or even exclusively, from home. While the virtual employee experience has its perks, it has yet to foster that strong sense of camaraderie and togetherness a shared physical workplace brings.

What does it mean to belong, and why is it a powerful parallel for employee engagement?

Think about Extinction Rebellion for a moment. Picture a group of activists. They’ve glued themselves to the road, angry motorists sound horns, and exasperated police officers warn of potential prosecution, but the climate rebels aren’t deterred.

Why? When a group of people believe in something passionately and have found like-minded cohorts, they will act far outside the norm to work towards a common goal.

Another example of how belonging fuels engagement is Martin Lewis’s money-saving website. It receives huge levels of engagement because people have coalesced there around a common aim: challenging the financial status quo.

Of course, the business world is more nuanced. While people are frequently passionate about their jobs, it is rarely with the same intensity that polarising issues like the climate crisis can provoke. But whether physical or virtual, a shared experience, common purpose and like-mindedness can build a similar sense of belonging to a people, an aim, a cause.

With tech, we already see disproportionate levels of engagement around health, wellbeing, fitness and money apps. If someone feels belonging through a tech platform, it’s frequently because they share something in common with other users. As an example, consider Garmin and the people coalescing around the posting of run times after getting an exercise tracking watch as a reward – they’re driven to engage in the app because of a sense of community.

The road to belonging

There is a misleading idea that belonging is something you create after an employee has joined. But this need not be so. Even though times have changed, the journey to belonging should start at the very first interview. And the best way to power that progress is through recognition and reward.

In some respects, the benefits market is guilty of not going that extra mile to innovate fast enough to adapt to the state of the world.

A potential employee should be able to log in to your benefits platform from their first interview. Not only will they see the rewards on offer, but if you’ve targeted those perks in a way that demonstrates your company’s values, the interviewee would swiftly identify just who and what you are.

If those values resonate with the candidate’s, as they should, a sense of belonging would be stirred from the very start.

Imagine an interviewee accessing your available benefits and encountering an interconnected world where potential mentors and new colleagues with shared interests can swiftly be identified. Just imagine the sense of belonging this could achieve.

How the shifting view of benefits promotes belonging

Increasingly, companies recognise that those green shoots of belonging can be watered by aligning benefits with their employer value proposition. This means a shift towards employees having greater choice around everything benefits. For example, workers should be free to put bonuses into a learning budget or trade unused holidays for a valued resource.

Rewards should connect other aspects of HR: wellbeing, learning, and sustainability. The latter priority is at the forefront of Amba’s philosophy. Environmental values are key to the modern worker, particularly Millenials and Gen Z. By offering ethical benefits that resonate with the workforce’s beliefs, and ally with causes they care about, we help employers to develop a deeper sense of belonging in their organisation.

To learn more about taking reward and recognition to the next level, check out our thoughts on the net zero pension pot and why corporates can’t ignore it. Or to talk more with us about boosting employee belonging, get in touch with us today.

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