After Three Years of Crisis, What Will Keep Employees Engaged and Motivated?

BY Tania Rahman | May 31, 2023

Over the past three years, workers have had to learn how to adapt and build new skills in order to succeed in a constantly changing work environment. In the aftermath of the pandemic, this same workforce is now experiencing extensive burnout. Now, organizations are tasked with finding ways to help their employees exit survival mode, through means of building an inclusive culture that supports a sense of employee engagement.

During a panel discussion at From Day One's Brooklyn conference, moderated by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, a group of panelists offered their perspective on how their business is renewing a sense of meaning among its employees.

Widespread Employee Burnout

According to Dale Cook, co-founder and CEO of Learn to Live, people often think in two ways when it comes to burnout.

“There’s the external forces that we all experience, heavy deadlines, heavy workloads, life pressures. There’s [also] the internal side of how we manage those things on a day to day basis.”

He said that when his organization works with partners, they tend to focus on the internal side: the things that are within their control, like reframing mental health, and providing the right tools at the right time. Cook cites his own experience struggling with mental health in college and his access to mental health services as a key influence on his company’s mode of helping others do the same to manage their burnout.

And yet, Lydia points out that frontline managers are often the ones truly shouldering much of the burden as they watch their teams get burned out. The key to combating this and building stronger relationships with employees, Dale said, lies in a manager’s ability to be vulnerable with one’s own mental health journey.

One of the biggest shifts that Liz Pittinger sees as head of customer success at Stork Club is in the transparency behind communicating any strategic decision-making for the sake of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She points to how fertility journeys and menopause are silent stressors that contribute to burnout. These are aspects of health care that Stork Club incorporated into its benefits portfolio.

The critical aspect here is how these decisions are shared to the organization at large, so that people have an understanding as to why certain health care benefits are necessary.

Engaging the Workforce

A simple change in scenery could be the key driver in building engagement among employees.

At MasterCard, Charman Hayes highlights the value of in-person connection with colleagues. As EVP of people and capability, technology, Hayes helps underpin activities like volunteering, mentorship, game engagement, and learning and development to fulfill human connectivity.

“It's been a great opportunity since we've come out of our basements and our bedrooms.”

Noting MasterCard’s goal in using technology to bring people together, Charman indicated that human connection can be tastefully met in person where it matters, and they can also be met virtually.

Giving employees a sense of purpose through social impact programs is a priority at NBCUniversal. Jessica Clancy, who serves as SVP of corporate social responsibility, said the media company’s Talent Lab allows employees to be “nominated for a learning experience that wraps around inclusive leadership, the principles and values we care about at NBC, and integrates it with social impact.”

The full panel of speakers, pictured, discussed how they are focusing on engagement, inclusion, and motivation within their organizations (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)

Clancy said that having employees “not just participating in community service, but actively working on leadership development alongside young people from that community” is an important differentiator.

“It really helps employees to think about the skills around empathy, listening, inclusivity that they are practicing in the community, and that they’re going to bring back to the job,” she said.

From a leadership perspective, ensuring employee engagement is often personal.

“I feel a very deep sense of responsibility to ensure that we are positively impacting lives, whether it's other employees in the organization, fans, especially in the community more broadly,” said Jane Son, co-head of foundation and community engagement at the New York Mets.

Encouraging Empathy and Inclusion in the Organization

According to Dale, isolation is one of the leading issues for mental health. “As much as we’ve advanced our conversation together around destigmatizing mental health, it’s still the number one barrier for people in the workforce that often translates into fear of discrimination.”

To combat potential discrimination, his organization offers programs and services that are completely private and confidential.

For Stork Club, the path to effective inclusion in their mission is simple: reduce the cost of health care.

“Every single day, we're dealing with people who are desperate to start a family or not, who don't know if they can financially afford it. When we promote empathy, we start with the member experience,” said Liz.

“When our care navigations share member stories with us, we’re getting the celebrations, the picture of their newborns, and we convey that back to the customer and through the entire company to make sure everyone understands and feels connected to what our purposes are.”

Discovering the Next Steps in Professional Development

Often, a natural transition from volunteering in the workplace is finding an opportunity to utilize new skills and apply it to positions of leadership, development, and service. This makes internal initiatives like that of NBCUniversal and MasterCard useful for those in leadership to recognize when an individual wants to evolve to the next stage in skill building.

“Leaders can talk about the skills they need for projects, and employees can share that they want to build on and develop those skills,” said Charman. “We add this into our talent review process which translates into human resources.”

At Learn to Live, there is a strong belief that acts of service is an important part of a mental health journey.

“What I'm intrigued about is that interconnection between best practices, community service, and skills building, coupled with how people are working on themselves at the same time. That intersection is something worth exploring for organizations,” said Dale.

Tania Rahman is a native New Yorker who works at the intersection of digital marketing and tech. She enjoys writing both news stories and fiction, hot chocolate on cold days, reading, live music, and learning new things.

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How Employers Are Boosting Internal Mobility and Career Development

Developing talent from within a company’s ranks simply makes a lot of sense. The benefits include greater productivity because employees are motivated to reach their goals, cost savings and time savings from the job search and onboarding processes, and increased employee satisfaction as workers feel they are valued.But as with all corporate practices, how a company puts an idea into practice makes a difference. At From Day One’s Manhattan conference, a panel of leaders spoke to the topic, “Creating Opportunity Within: How Employers Are Boosting Talent and Career Development,” sharing the thoughtful and effective ways their organizations are successfully promoting employees.The executive panel discussion featured five dynamic and creative business leaders who described their own career development and the ways they support and encourage the same for others.At Visa, the message that career development is a priority comes from the very top, says Melissa Fridman, head of people and global merchant sales & acquiring at Visa, North America. Ryan McInerney ascended to CEO in February 2023, after being prepared for this transition for two years, Fridman says. And among his first actions as chief executive was to promote others into leadership roles, which reinforced the message throughout the company that there was career mobility.Fridman described the company’s efforts as driven from the top down and intentional, and relayed how as a new CEO, McInerney blocked off a few days this year with his leadership team to discuss talent across the company. “And everybody knows that, so in advance all the businesses are spending time with their HR partners and their leadership teams talking about talent. That type of intention and knowing that we’re being deliberate about succession planning because of the robustness of those conversations, [leads to a lot of] follow up action.”But a bottom-up strategy also works. Penguin Random House adopted a growth charter a decade ago that “infiltrated through our personal development conversations and put the power back in the hands of the employee,” said Joanne Mallia-Barsati, vice president of global talent management and development. This growth and development methodology was designed to create two-way coaching conversations between a manager and employee to elicit “how people really think about their careers, how they own their careers and how they are equally responsible in thinking about their development at the company,” Mallia-Barsati said.Brent Vader, VP of HR at Verizon recognized that at a company with a large frontline employee population, internal mobility and career development might look different than at other organizations. “It was very difficult to figure out how to make the right connections, you don’t just want to post and pray and hope that someone recognizes my profile. There has to be something more deliberate,” said Vader.And so over the course of a few years, Verizon created a program called Journey Forward to map out how ambitious frontline workers can get ahead. “It encompasses everything that we’ve talked about, whether it's finding a network, making sure you have a sponsor, and understanding the right skills and experiences necessary to qualify you for that next role,” he said.The panelists spoke about the topic "Creating Opportunity Within: How Employers Are Boosting Talent and Career Development," in a session moderated by journalist Jeanhee Kim The point of the Journey Forward is to give employees a systematic approach for their development plan, as well as a plan for getting training and finding a mentor, to make it easier to scale to their next opportunity.This effort to develop talent from within is a shift from the more traditional practice of attracting new talent to companies. A tell-tale sign that a company is serious about career development is when its internal career page is as sophisticated and thoughtfully designed as its external one, said Marcus Strang, lead solutions engineer of recruitment marketing platform Clinch.“We’ve started to see a shift in the market. 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Spending time in a new location allows the employee to get to know the team, understand the business, build connections, and really understand the culture, she says. From this program, they’ve experienced numerous business achievements, “including new imprints created, book partnerships and acquisitions,” she said.Jeanhee Kim is an independent journalist who has worked for CoinDesk, Crain’s New York Business, Money magazine and Forbes Asia.

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Promoting Well-Being While Boosting Performance in a Changing Workforce

Who does the work and how they do it is constantly evolving. “So, how do we make our work environments still attractive? How do we still develop our employees?” asks Kami Peterson, senior director, regional HR & employee Relations, U.S., Thomson Reuters. At From Day One’s Minneapolis conference, Peterson spoke on a panel titled “Boosting Productivity in a Changing Workplace–and Workforce.”“We need to think about not just the products in which we serve our customers, but also what type of product we are delivering internally. 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Other factors hampering productivity are diminished resources, meaning employees are forced to do more with less, and a lack of continuity due to high turnover rates, says Deutscher.How Company Culture Impacts ProductivityCommunication is the key to creating a culture that fosters productivity, says Chad Deshler, senior VP of U.S. sales for LifeSpeak Inc. “There are two common themes that I’ve seen with organizations," he said. “One is how you communicate, and the other is how you communicate.”In today’s workplace, some employees don’t feel their employers have a sense of loyalty toward them. “If you open up that door of communication and create a level of transparency, it goes a long way, sometimes even more than what a paycheck can do for somebody,” he said.Joel Geary,  vice president of human resources, global business units & medical scientific affairs at Beckman Coulter Diagnostics, says it’s crucial for an international company to have a common culture and way of doing things that crosses borders. 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She had the opportunity to teach at the ground level. “There were a number of students that came up to me so happy that I was there. And it made me feel that I was making a difference for them.” That’s why she works in the DEI space, and at GitHub, she is helping to shepherd work around organization development, culture and diversity. The company has four pillars of DEI, says Carasco, who supports each of them. One is understanding psychological contracts, or employee expectations. If those are broken, it’s hard for the person to reach their potential in the workplace. Second is psychological safety, because if they don’t feel safe they won’t take risks. Third, having those deliberate cross-company collaborations to foster an inclusive culture. 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