When employees are captivated, they are more inclined to invest in their work, resulting in higher-quality output, whereas disengaged employees are more likely to perform the bare minimum to survive. This has been proven true for businesses with employee engagement strategies.
While engaging employees is an effective business approach, it is not always easy to implement. Your initial thought may expand your benefits package and include exciting amenities like a cold brew on tap or an on-site wellness facility. While your staff is likely to like the new items, these modifications contribute more to work satisfaction than to engagement, two ideas that are connected but distinct.
Money is no longer the sole motivator for employees these days. It is their whole workplace experience. Employee engagement will occur as a result of creating the appropriate work environment that supports employees’ career growth and fosters open communication in the workplace.
However, how can you strike a balance between these elements and create an atmosphere that is optimal for your employees? Well, this is the time to develop effective staff engagement methods.
Gallup study says, “only 13% of company staff are engaged at work worldwide.” It is not that these businesses are unaware of the importance of employee engagement or make no attempt to enhance it.
As you may know, many of today’s largest firms rely on their workers’ intellectual capital. Their human capital is not readily replaced. This indicates they’ve expended considerable effort figuring out how to retain people.
The good news is that they are not proprietary information. You may work on them for your own organisation by following the tactics to create better or high employee engagement.
So, before we get started, let’s go back to the beginning and define employee engagement.
Everything to know about employee engagement
Often mistaken with job happiness, engagement refers to an individual’s emotional commitment to the company for which they work. Employee engagement is described as an employee’s motivation for, enthusiasm for, and investment in their job and the organisation to which they belong.
Staff engagement between different senior leaders or team members is a tough concept to grasp, mostly because it is an intangible concept with practical consequences for a business’s performance. Highly engaged employees have been found to boost productivity, profitability, and turnover. Having a comprehensive and deliberate employee engagement plan that is targeted to the specific requirements of your employees is critical to your long-term success.
Let’s dissect some of the most frequently used and effective employee engagement techniques and see how they’ve been implemented in real-world organisations in case you’re wondering how to encourage staff? Well, go no further than these proven employee engagement strategies.
Top employee engagement strategies
Protect your essential values
Your company’s fundamental principles should be at the heart of its culture and should be explicitly communicated to every employee from day one. Your company’s core principles should articulate what is genuinely important to you and the ideas you will seek to preserve as you grow.
Employees must work with your firm with a heartful attitude towards it in order to make themselves organically engaged. A consistent relationship between you and your employees filled with communication may help you establish core values for your whole team.
This has been a proven method and many companies have succeeded in fostering a good office environment or culture and push their workers to feel inclined to the business according to Itesh Sharma from Human Resource Dept, TatvaSoft.com.
Provide flexible work hours
The conventional “butt in seat” attitude to work is undergoing a transformation.
This is one of the most accepted employee engagement strategies globally. It is unrealistic to anticipate workers to be personally available for a nine-to-five job when they are also contributing and working on weekends from their homes.
Numerous dedicated individuals desire advancement in their employment. However, they may also anticipate a little freedom to pay attention to their kids’ life and schedule and eventually spend quality family time.
Furthermore, this should be provided. If your employees leave for an hour at 3 p.m. to take their children to the doctor, only to return at 5 p.m. and work until midnight, they deserve that flexibility.
Numerous companies, particularly those in professional services, are beginning to see the advantages of flexible work arrangements that can give employees a satisfactory work-life balance improving employee engagement eventually.
However, merely providing these flexible work options is insufficient.
This is critical. 30% of workers believe they have less prestige in the workplace as a result of their flexible work schedules.
In other words, a poorly implemented flexible working plan will have little impact on your efforts to increase employee engagement.
However, if the programme is well-designed, it has the potential to enhance employee happiness.
Consult personnel from several departments when making significant adjustments or decisions
A critical component of employee engagement is ensuring that your workers do not feel like people of no account.
People want to feel valued as members of the workforce, that management regards them as more than numbers on a page, and that their opinion counts.
Of course, achieving this on a large scale is difficult. Except for employee surveys, which are occasionally viewed as stuffy formalities, it’s difficult to poll every employee in every location. However, some businesses succeed in this endeavour.
Southwest Airlines, which has developed a reputation for having a strong business culture and high levels of employee engagement, has devised an innovative method of engaging its staff.
When the airline chose to revamp its uniforms, it made the decision without consulting a third-party designer.
Rather than that, it consulted with its own workers. The airline received responses from thousands of interested individuals after reaching out to employees in several divisions.
It whittled the list down to 43 people, had biweekly meetings in Chicago and Dallas for 19 months, and ultimately developed a practical, elegant uniform.
You may lack the requisite capacity to hold so many conferences. In such a scenario, you may want to try conducting staff focus groups online. Sparkbay is completely free to use.
The final result took into account the demands and tastes of the individuals who wear these uniforms on a daily basis.
The event, according to one employee who had worked for the airline for 36 years, was “unforgettable.”
Additionally, initiatives like these provide staff with the opportunity to work on new problems and interact with colleagues from various departments. Work can be a daily slog, and these adventures provide a breath of fresh air.
Reward excellent performers
Do you even know what keeps an employee going, it’s the rewards and recognition. It becomes easy to develop engagement for your workers when they start to accept their important presence in your business for a long term goal. However, appreciating them in a timely manner can be the best way to show your gesture and push them for a long race. Timely appreciation from companies does no harm.
Many companies offer employee compensation with gift vouchers from amazon, free lunch coupons,– anything that is appropriate for your staff and consistent with your fundamental beliefs.
Additionally, provide employees with a means of recognising their peers; employees who feel valued and appreciated by their coworkers will become more engaged. This way, you can conserve the diversity and inclusion between staff and improve employee engagement.
Image: Pexels
Appreciate employees
66% of employees would leave unappreciative employment.
Certain businesses opt to demonstrate their rewards through corporate advantages. Free breakfast on Mondays, for example, or a fruit box in the workplace are lovely touches.
Another method to demonstrate your appreciation for employees is to recognise those who go above and beyond.
Using an eight × ten glass photo frame dubbed the Gratitude Board, Legal Monkeys discovered a way to convey employee appreciation throughout the workweek naturally.
Workers send letters of gratitude to their co-workers and privately deliver the notes to them; the receiver retains the note on their worktops until they’re all set to move it on to another colleague.
One of the most often raised charges against staff appreciation programmes is that they are forced. It should be natural and usual, but yet obvious so that people can appreciate your efforts.
Prioritise 360-degree sessions
360-degree critique rounds are an excellent method to increase employee engagement. Additionally, they provide a chance to get insight into what works and what does not.
Let me shed some light on what 360-degree critique rounds are before we dig into how 360-degree reviews are implemented.
In a nutshell, it’s an opportunity for employees to solicit feedback from those in their immediate vicinity.
That is correct. Traditionally, employees received feedback solely from those in positions of authority. Employees are evaluated in this manner by their supervisor, their subordinates, and their coworkers.
The issue is, while 360-degree evaluations are an excellent idea in principle, they are notoriously difficult to implement in practice.
360s, when executed properly, are effective. When implemented incorrectly, they either perpetuate the status quo or aggravate personnel.
Several of the errors that businesses make while adopting 360-degree review sessions are as follows:
- Not securing (and demonstrating!) executive-level support for the initiative
- Leaving top executives out of 360-degree review sessions
- Providing little to no background with which to evaluate the results
- Failure to connect feedback to an individual’s growth within the context of the organisation’s wider professional development framework
On the other hand, here’s how businesses may do effective 360-degree feedback sessions:
- Using scientific research to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) to use to evaluate their managers, rather than anecdotal information about what makes a strong leader
- Explanation of the exercise’s purpose, as well as advice on how to understand and contextualise the review’s outcomes
- Constructing the survey with care to avoid survey fatigue
- Customising the survey to each respondent’s function to ensure that managers are not evaluated on criteria unrelated to their position
- Providing an overview report that explains how workers fit into the organisation and identifies opportunities for development.
Don’t forget to evaluate
While these are actually attempted employee engagement strategies, there are zero certainties that these will work for your company; you may have a diverse team with unique considerations. Prior to implementing a new plan, take stock of your company’s current state by assessing employee engagement.
A survey of employee engagement is among the most productive — and helpful — ways for assessing employee engagement. The benefit of staff evaluation is that it can be sent rapidly to every employee, providing a more accurate picture of the total involvement as a staff.
Additionally, you may modify the questions to generate brief evaluations that can be administered more often. These enable you to monitor employee engagement as your firm expands and your corporate culture changes. You can reserve more comprehensive surveys for quarterly or yearly evaluations.
What is the point? You cannot successfully begin an employee engagement strategy without first polling your employees and analysing current data, so prepare ahead to evaluate engagement.
In Summary
Nobody enjoys disengagement among employees. It’s costly and detrimental to morale.
However, there is a wealth of data demonstrating that increasing employee engagement is both achievable and quantifiable. You require the appropriate methods.
Examine your company’s culture critically, find areas for employee engagement improvement, and use these top employee engagement strategies to get started.
Bear in mind that retaining happy and motivated staff requires effort and consistency. Results may take a while to manifest. However, if you invest your time and effort truly, you will quickly develop a thriving staff.
About the Author
Olivia Diaz is a technology observer in a software development company. She is a writer, tech geek and keeps a close watch over the industry focusing on the latest technology news and gadgets.
