How employees feel about their work and office environment is a significant driver of success for your entire organisation. Engaged workers are more productive, reliable and can become your greatest brand ambassadors.
Effective leaders know that employee engagement is a fundamental part of achieving success in competitive markets. Ultimately, it helps to increase productivity and achieve better quality work output.
We’ve outlined some essential ways you can improve employee engagement in your business and enjoy the many benefits that come from having employees who actually care about their job.
- Define and Measure Engagement
Engagement isn’t just about the most active or vocal employees in your Monday meetings. Engagement is defined differently in different situations and it is helpful to map out what it means for your business before you plan any future engagement initiatives.
It could refer to how active your teams are when embarking on sales and marketing activities, or how dedicated your creative team is to develop new concepts and briefs. Measuring current levels of engagement can also help identify what’s working for your company and where you need to improve.
- Build a Strategy
Once you have figured out what you want to achieve, create a strategy that recognises employee engagement. This can be part of the overall rewards or bonus program or tied into the individual targets of each employee. Whatever you do, focus on creating organisational alignment by matching other company initiatives with your employee engagement plans.
- Set Expectations
Some believe engagement comes down to how well employees understand the expectations of their role. If they don’t know what is expected of them, how can they possibly strive for excellence? When the expectations have been set, make sure you recognise and celebrate when they are met and take prompt corrective action when they are not met.
- Consider what motivates your employees
Employees are people and people are individuals so find out what motivates them. Don’t simply assume they all want the same thing. Some people want financial rewards while others prefer training opportunities or progressing their role, for example.
- Remove barriers
A colleague of ours says “we wouldn’t have to spend so much time, effort and money on Employee Engagement initiatives if the organisation’s systems and processes didn’t disengage employees so much in the first place. Where does your organisation make it difficult for employees to do a good job? How could you change this?