What Can You Do to Increase Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement strategy is the cornerstone of most organizations.
It is a complex, long-term process that requires commitment and effort from leaders to support the efforts of their employees and make their organization more productive.
What makes employee engagement strategy so challenging? Three main reasons for low employee engagement are:
- Lack of a clear understanding of what engagement is
- Failure to recognize their current level of engagement
- Lack of access to a source of support from others who understand the issues they face
Many organizations have attempted to improve employee engagement.
However, they struggle because they do not have a clear strategy in place or they do not understand what the drivers of employee engagement are.
As a result, many employees feel disconnected, leading them to be less productive, less engaged, and even unmotivated altogether.
Why Are Engaged Employees So Important?
Employee engagement strategy can have such a significant impact on the productivity and performance of your organization.
Disengaged employees create higher costs of recruiting, training, and retaining talent.
Therefore, creating a company culture that supports engagement is key to achieving long-term success.
Employee motivation has to do with how much your employees are invested in their work. It also has to do with the internal needs and desires of your employees as they relate to their work.
How to Improve Employee Satisfaction
Employee retention is hard to achieve when there is a disconnect between the employees and their employers.
However, disengaged employees can be re-engaged with the help of engagement strategies.
Here are some ideas that you can implement immediately in your organization:
1. Appreciate Top Performers
Employees who take extra mile in their work are a boon to any organization.
It is important to reward them for their hard work. After all, organizational success relies on the work of employees.
In a time when people are so preoccupied with many things, it is important to create an environment where employees feel motivated and encouraged to work hard.
To boost performance, you can provide monetary rewards, promotions, or even a day off to your employees.
2. Encourage Employee to Work on Personal Projects
Remote employees usually work long hours with little opportunity to work on personal projects.
You can encourage them to take up personal projects by offering them with resources, like access to project management software or collaboration tools.
3. Establish Your Business Core Value and Mission
Whether it’s during the hiring process or after hiring, make sure that the new employees know what your company values.
These values will become the foundation for everything else you do, so it is essential to establish them at the onset.
Business core values are typically made up of a few words that best define your organization’s identity.
A sense of community, creativity, innovation, and transparency are just a few examples. The more you can articulate your company’s values, the better.
4. Give and Ask for Feedbacks
To gauge the engagement levels in your organization, you need to give and ask for feedback.
Giving employees the chance to share their views and opinions will help improve the working environment and engagement levels.
When it comes to asking for feedback, you should be specific about what you want to know.
For example, if you want to know if employees are happy with the salary increase that they have received recently, you can create an anonymous employee survey.
In this survey, you can ask about the job satisfaction levels, salary increases and other issues. You can also include a survey for employees to share their views on their colleagues.
By including the employee’s perspective in your surveys, you can get to know if there are any team issues that need to be addressed.
5. Give Support for Employee’s Physical and Mental Health
Every corporate culture should never neglect the importance of employees’ physical and mental health.
It’s one of the key factors that determines the overall productivity and satisfaction levels of employees.
Some strategies that you can implement immediately to boost employee’s mental and physical health are providing counselling, offering on-site medical services, and setting up a gym.
Additionally, companies should offer different benefits that help employees relax their minds and body.
These include flexible work schedules, regular company holidays, and other benefits that help reduce stress levels in the office.
6. Provide Training and Professional Development Program
High employee turnover rate often reflects the absence of training and professional development program.
Most employees prefer to change job when they feel their current role is not interesting or challenging.
On the other hand, high turnover rate can also happen when employees feel overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do.
Therefore, training and professional development is a crucial component of your organization.
Organizations often use professional development workshops as an opportunity for employees to share ideas and experiences with each other.
Such workshops will boost the morale of all participants, as well as increase their productivity and efficiency.
7. Set Up Team-Building Activities
Teamwork is one company’s core value you should never forget. However, the question is how to encourage your employees to work together?
The best way is to involve them in team-building activities that involve interaction and communication between colleagues.
Team-building activities not only develop team spirit but also build good working relationships between employees and make them feel comfortable.
This can also help you in retaining your employees.
Team-building activities include group projects, competitions, outdoor activities, and many more.
These activities will also help you get rid of negative thoughts about the job and can motivate the employee for the long term.
Making a Positive Change in Your Company Culture
Taking employee engagement initiatives can be challenging. But when you follow these 7 engagement strategies, you will definitely see a positive change in the company culture.
Don’t wait until the last minute to take action on the employee engagement strategy. Make sure that your employees are happy and productive now!
About the Author
I hope that my post has helped you know more about Employee Engagement. Feel free to leave a comment and tag me and I will answer them. Follow my profile to get the latest content I post to stay ahead of the curve.
I am the Founder of Cudy Technologies, a full-stack EdTech startup helping teachers and students learn better. I am also a mentor and angel investor in other Startups of my other interests (Proptech, Fintech, HRtech, Ride-hailing, C2C marketplaces, and SaaS). You can also find me on Cudy for early-stage Startup Founder mentorship and advice.
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