Globally, there has been an increasing emphasis on employee engagement. Business leaders have realized that this is no longer a problem limited to an organization’s HR department. Instead, it’s a serious concern that needs careful thought, considering that almost every important area of your business is impacted by employee engagement. Efficient employee engagement management strategies enable employees to enhance their performance and the organization as a whole, resulting in higher profitability, improved talent retention, enhanced customer retention, and decreased employee turnover.
In this article, we go through the definition of employee engagement, its importance for the organization’s bottom line, and the top tips on engaging employees effectively.
What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is the emotional commitment and excitement workers have for their job and environment. Engaged employees are concerned about their work and the organization’s success and believe their contributions matter. Given its obvious connections to satisfaction and morale, employee engagement is crucial to an organization’s success.
Understanding Employee Engagement
The vast majority of CEOs agree that a company’s most valuable asset is its workforce. In reality, though, it is only true when the vast majority of employees are fully committed to their job. If not, they either contribute little or actively harm the company.
There are 3 levels of employee engagement:
- Physical: The individual skill sets of the employees correspond with the complexity of the assignment.
- Emotional: Employees are inspired and challenged when doing their job, and when they’re finished, they feel successful.
- Cognitive: employees are completely immersed in their work.
When employees are engaged on all these levels, their work involvement is at its peak, and they start to develop an emotional bond with it. Employees who are engaged exhibit more dedication to the company’s objectives, feel that their job is essential, that their managers value and support them, and that they are directly responsible for the company’s success.
Why is Employee Engagement Important?
Workforce engagement motivates people to put in more effort and resolve problems, progress and develop more quickly, get along better with colleagues, and stay in the company for a longer period of time.
Here are the top five benefits of employee engagement:
High employee retention: Uninterested and disengaged employees may leave their employer abruptly and frequently. By emphasizing employee engagement, you can achieve high employee retention because people will be more invested and determined to stick around if they like their job, the other employees, and the company.
Enhanced productivity: Employees who are engaged put in more effort because they enjoy in their role and are confident in their contribution to the organization.
Improved customer service: Customer satisfaction is an essential component of any profitable organization. Strong employee engagement enhances your business’s client service, which is beneficial for customer retention, upsells, and recommendations. When they are content and interested in their work, employees would likely exceed expectations to guarantee customers have a positive experience.
Higher profitability: Sales in highly engaged companies are typically 21% higher than those in disengaged organizations. It makes the perfect reason that the company’s sales and earnings would rise when keeping the right people, enhancing efficiency, and improving customer service.
Better adoption of company initiatives: Engaged workforce is more likely to partake in new business-boosting activities that your organization launches. They’ll enthusiastically join because they appreciate what your business is trying to do, which will result in high adoption rates and sustained engagement.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels
How To Improve Employee Engagement
If you’re planning on enhancing employee engagement in your company, here are some tips to consider:
Embrace the Bottom-Up Concept
Start with the lowest levels of your organization’s staff when making any important decisions. You can encourage employees to express their thoughts and concerns through the use of questionnaires and surveys. This approach will make them feel more valued and respected.
Promote Two-Way Communication
Keeping the workforce in the dark won’t help your employee engagement initiative. Companies that behave secretively and only share information with those who must know are likely to have lower employee engagement rates. You should encourage employees to voice their issues in order to prevent them from feeling unheard or unimportant. Communication should be two-way. Top company executives adhere to an open-door approach and refrain from taking advantage of “top-secret” knowledge.
Encourage Active Participation
A company is a community, and each member contributes to it by carrying out a specified duty. At the same time, you should uphold a certain degree of impartiality and equality where everyone believes they are vital to the company’s community. Any engagement-promoting action, from planning a yearly event to as simple as taking your employees out to dinner, can aid in fostering this sense of community among your employees.
Give Recognition
Recognition is one of the top drivers of employee engagement so try to establish an environment that values recognition and offers rewards and incentives for good work. Keep in mind the commendations should be consistent with the organization’s mission, business outcomes, and guiding principles.
Prioritize Professional Development
To support the organization’s growth long term, you should nurture and develop every human resource you hire. By conducting bespoke training sessions or funding further education for the employees, you are directly investing in your business’s future and fostering employee loyalty.
Hire Qualified Managers
Managers are a crucial part of any employee engagement program because they act as a liaison between boardroom participants and the workforce. The management style of the particular manager determines whether they feel safe, ignored, or angry.
How To Measure Employee Engagement
Understanding how to measure employee engagement is an important part of any engagement-boosting strategy. Here are four easy methods that can help you:
Use a Pulse Survey
Employee pulse surveys are a fantastic way to measure employee engagement since they provide quick, reliable, and helpful information. They are brief and very focused. The purpose of these employee surveys is to continuously learn what employees think about important topics such as communication and relationships with coworkers, job-related duties, and the workplace in general.
Conduct Employee Lifecycle Surveys
You can gather input from workers during the most important points in their time spent working for your company by conducting employee lifecycle surveys. Here are a few examples:
- New-hire surveys — How do recent hires feel about their onboarding? Do they see themselves in your company long-term? Asking the right questions can help you get the information you need to engage new employees now but also in a later period of their tenure.
- Stay interviews — Employing interviews with tenured members is a fantastic approach to getting employee feedback and learning what motivates or demotivates them. What keeps employees in your organization? Is there something that could cause them to leave? What steps can be taken to stop it?
- Exit interviews — What led the worker to leave your company? How did the remaining staff fare after the turnover? How can you prevent this from happening in the future? You may make your engagement efforts more strategic by using the information you learn from exit experience.
Schedule Regular One on One Meetings
Meeting with staff members one-on-one regularly is another excellent technique to gauge engagement. This approach has the benefit of being face-to-face — you’ll be able to learn more specific information about each concern raised, but also build relationships and ensure that each employee feels like they are making progress toward their goals.
Measure the Turnover Rate
The turnover rate reveals the proportion of employees who departed your company over a specific time frame. Employees frequently change employment when they feel unchallenged, see no room for advancement, or have a bad work experience. Therefore, a high employee turnover rate may be a sign of low engagement. When used with exit interviews, this tactic could help you uncover the underlying problems affecting engagement levels.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
The Bottom Line
Engaged workers are the backbone of a successful company. Businesses are better positioned for success when their workforce is agile and go the extra mile to enhance workflows that increase productivity. If you’re ready to leverage your company’s employee engagement, Focus can help you build an engaged community that stays in sync and ensures each goal is met.
