Empowering Engagement: Strategies for Thriving in Evolving Work Environments

Kirstie Loveridge is executive vice president, of people and culture at AEG Europe, with over two decades of HR experience, 13 of them at AEG, the world’s leading sports and entertainment company. Kirstie’s role involves overseeing a team of over 1000 people in incredibly diverse roles across the company’s array of businesses spanning venues, touring, music festivals, ticketing and head office. Her first gig was Wham and this year she’s looking forward to seeing Stevie Nicks at American Express Presents BST at Hyde Park. She’s also a big fan of Take That and can’t live without her Peloton subscription.

Expected Innovative Developments In Employee Engagement To Reshape The Landscape Of Overcoming Business Challenges

Without employee engagement, we risk stagnation or costly high employee churn. The media has spotlighted quite a few of the current challenges on this front – some more sympathetically than others - including so-called quiet-quitting, generation sicknote, and the impact of menopause on women in the workplace. These are over-generalisations, but they do highlight an important concern: since the pandemic, the world of work has shifted significantly and businesses need to keep pace with that. Hybrid working, an uncertain economy, and real concerns about the world around them can leave employees feeling more unmoored, so business needs to work a lot harder than a drinks trolley and foosball table to create authentic engagement… That said, there will always be a place for free food with pizza and cupcakes being an AEG staple in terms of capturing the attention of our people!

Encourage people to stop staying in their lane! Fostering an environment where ideas from any quarter are welcomed, and tapping into multi-generational knowledge, will make sure a company doubly benefits from experience and fresh thinking, while employees feel seen and valued.

It’s also crucial that organisations map out potential career pathways from the get-go - as early as the recruitment stage – to ensure employees have a real sense of what’s possible for their growth within the company.

Ultimately though, there is no one-size fits all engagement solution. What works for one organisation, may not work for another and it’s the job of people and culture to truly understand and engage their people on this journey – dialogue is crucial.

Experiences From One Of The Projects You Were Recently Involved In

A big piece of work we undertake every year is our global employee engagement survey. This work is pivotal in helping us understand levels of engagement across the company, as well as identifying any roadblocks. Without that understanding, with the best will in the world, you can come up with initiative after initiative and it may not deliver staff retention or a happy workforce.

It’s genuinely a big task, but one that’s worth doing properly, in order to get to the right answers. The survey goes out to circa 3,500 employees globally. Over the following months, the results are collated and analysed, presented to the exec, then to senior leaders across each part of the business – which includes our employee network groups as part of our EDI strategy - and then to all employees. Following that, we develop action plans for each business, and each plan has actions for both the short and medium term. Limiting the long-term ensures the plans are dynamic and immediately actionable. To provide accountability, and keep us on track, we update everyone across the business on the status of those actions quarterly.

So, it’s quite an undertaking and an ongoing commitment. But too often in business, that final stage of accountability can fall through the cracks, leaving employees feeling that their opinion ultimately didn’t matter, or that their time was wasted, which will result in lower engagement.

Challenges In Your Business That Current Services Are Unable To Solve

The current cost of living crisis, hot on the heels of Brexit and the pandemic, is having an impact on the events and hospitality industries as a whole, but it’s particularly impacting those members of events staff who are paid hourly. Customer-facing roles are extremely demanding and with the increasing expectations of today’s consumer, ensuring that employees on the frontline are skilled, supported and empowered has never been more essential.

Our event teams are the face of our business. They’re there to help make sure you have a brilliant time when you come to a gig or festival, and if they’re not feeling it, we can’t expect them to pass it on. Through our engagement survey, we were able to identify the biggest obstacles our employees face and then think about ways of overcoming them. We’re looking at a number of initiatives, including making it easier for employees to live and working to make every employee feel part of the bigger AEG team, by telling their stories and introducing an Earned Wage access scheme, whereby employees can access a percentage of their earned wages ahead of the pay cycle, to make sure that an unexpected bill doesn’t get in the way of people earning a living.

Sometimes life gets in the way and there are just too many months left at the end of the money, making it harder for people to get to work, which, coupled with finding it more difficult to recruit, can pose problems for us as a business.

Critical Dos And Don’ts For HR Professionals The dos and don’ts are pretty straightforward, but they require commitment and drive to follow through, and sometimes a little diplomacy (or an iron fist in a velvet glove!) to keep the business focused on delivery.

1. Start by focusing on the brilliant basics and ensure you get this right first and foremost.

2. Listen to your staff – they’re your best source of intelligence and can often spot potential issues way before you ever will.

3. Honesty, transparency and communication – people will respect clarity, even when the news isn’t always positive, more than being left guessing.

4. Keep it simple – if an action is straightforward and readily understood, it’s instantly much more achievable than something abstract.

5. Ultimately, get things done – if you say you’re going to do something, find a way to do it. Sticking to your word builds trust.