Employee Engagement: Keeping Your Employees Engaged Throughout their Careers

Whether a new or seasoned employee, it is crucial to have an engagement strategy at your workplace. Engaged employees are more motivated and productive and tend to stay at work for longer. For older employees, this can translate into continued contributions to the organization, even as they approach retirement age.

Here are some strategies to engage all your employees:

• Offer training and development programs
• Create mentorship programs where younger/newer employees are paired with seasoned or more experienced employees to mentor them in the workplace
• Provide monthly social opportunities digitally or in-person
• Host team building events inside and outside of work
• Run an annual employee survey to gauge employee engagement
• Implement HR exit meetings with employees to better understand their reason for leaving the organization
• Hold holiday parties to foster employee connections and friendships
• Create a Diversity and Inclusion committee to ensure all employees feel included and seen
• Offer lunch time exercise programs like yoga or stretching
• Recognize excellence and promote employees when they exceed their goals and expectations
• Create an award and recognition program that offers gift cards, badges, or other tools for recognizing excellence as well as loyalty to the organization
• Promote and maintain fairness with recognition and salaries
• Promote and encourage a healthy work/life balance

As your employees near retirement, there are additional ways to engage more seasoned employees:

• Offer ongoing technology training
• Offer opportunities to attend conferences or events to keep engaged, network and stay up to date
• Connect new employees with older employees to encourage cross-knowledge sharing
• Offer retirement planning training to employees within 5 years of retirement – preparing your team both financially and mentally as they near retirement. My organization, the Municipal Retirees Organization Ontario, offers on-site Retirement Planning Seminars for municipal employees for just $25 each employee.
• Recognize years of service
• Host retirement parties to celebrate years of contributions
• Encourage leadership to be transparent and fair and ensure proper feedback is given to all team members with room for improvement and autonomy

Mature employees have worked in structured and scheduled environments for many years and the shift to retirement can be destabilizing. Engagement efforts such as a transitional strategy can support and motivate mature employees to remain interested and feel included as they near retirement. More experienced employees often have an endless wealth of experience and knowledge. Engaging them before they retire ensures that this valuable resource is utilized effectively, benefiting the organization through mentorship and skill-sharing and knowledge sharing. Engagement can positively impact the mental and physical health of all employees, reduce stress, and increase job satisfaction overall. This can lead to fewer health-related absences at work and a more productive and happier workforce.

Overall, fostering engagement among all employees is beneficial for them as well as for the organization. It helps in creating a move toward a more inclusive, experienced, and stable workforce who are more engaged and cohesive. Employee engagement strategies for the new, established, and seasoned employees can increase innovation, motivation and lead to the overall success and growth of the organization

Written by: Marianne Vrbanic, Alternate Director Zone 3, MROO