The Ultimate Guide to Employee Engagement

Employees are one of the most important assets any business could have; they are the lifeblood.

If your employees are dispassionate or checked out, then their productivity is bound to suffer, and therefore your bottom line is also likely to be affected. This is precisely why employee engagement is vital to the success of your business. Improving employee engagement is an ongoing process that requires continual reassessment and refinement. Read on to learn more.  

The Importance of Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is crucial to ensuring a productive workforce. An engaged workforce is far more likely to be motivated and focused on their work. The workforce is then far more likely to be satisfied with their roles, and employee retention is often higher because employees are less likely to look for other jobs that they think will be more fulfilling for them. The company as a whole is more likely to achieve both its short-term and long-term goals, which in turn helps to benefit the bottom line of the business. Speaking of goals and objectives, having a solid idea of your business's goals and communicating them to your staff can help with employee engagement too. Developing business goals is not always easy, which is why a lot of businesses choose to reach out to a business like 1ovmany, whose objective & key results methodology can be transformative.

Give Employees the Tools they Need to Succeed

While it is certainly true that many employees relish a challenge, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't do everything you can to ensure that their jobs are as easy as possible. Providing your employees with the training, resources and materials that they need to complete their jobs is essential. It helps to ensure that they are given all the tools for success. It makes sense to conduct regular check-ins with your staff to ensure that they have everything they need. As their role changes or the company grows, these needs might change, which is why the check-ins are important too. 

Encourage Communication

Communication is crucial for any and all areas of the business. In terms of employee engagement, communication serves several purposes. It allows you to outline your expectations to the employees. Your employees deserve to know what is expected of them. Outlining their tasks and duties also simply makes sense for the business too. This is why a lot of managers conduct annual performance reviews; it allows them to set goals for each individual employee and review their success and their progress over time. 

In encouraging them to communicate with you, it also helps you to identify barriers that they might be facing. It also helps you to get to know your staff and also encourages them to form bonds with each other. Communication should always be a two-way street, and by trying to encourage open and honest communication, you will find that your staff feel more comfortable approaching you when they face obstacles in their working lives which you can help solve, driving employee engagement. 

Be Open to Feedback

As mentioned above, providing feedback for your staff is incredibly important in helping them to grow and progress within the business. This helps to keep them engaged. However, in addition to providing feedback and encouraging them to think critically about their own performance, you and the management team in general also need to be willing to accept feedback too. The issues or gripes that your employees have in regard to the business should also be heard. If you want to ensure employee engagement, then you need to be willing to take feedback onboard. If your employees don't feel heard, they are far less likely to be engaged or remain within their roles. This doesn't mean that you can simply listen to their feedback and do nothing; you need to demonstrate a willingness to change and improve. 

Identify Strengths and Promote Career Progression

Employees are far more likely to be engaged and satisfied when their job role is more closely aligned with their professional strengths and speaks directly to their interests too. Although this won't always be possible for bigger businesses, if you can, it would make sense to try to tailor job roles, tasks and responsibilities to their strengths. It also makes sense to take into account preferences too, although, again, this will not always be possible. Employees today also tend to prioritise the opportunity for career progression when it comes to choosing the business that they want to work for. Developing the careers of your staff and offering progression and promotions can help to keep your staff engaged. It might be worth developing mentorship programs or encouraging training opportunities. 

Embrace a Flexible Working Approach

Employees are human beings with their own lives. They may have any number of other responsibilities which they need to take care of; they might also be affected by extraneous factors. Sometimes, being stringent in your approach to work can demotivate your staff and lead them to becoming checked out or uninterested because they don't feel valued. Embracing flexibility when it comes to your approach to work can be beneficial. As long as the work gets done to the agreed upon standard, does it matter whether your staff works within an office or at home, or even if they make up their own hours as long as they fulfil their contractual obligations? This can even extend to their preferred working styles in terms of working alone versus working in an office setting. 

Offer Incentives

If you want to get the most out of your staff, you need to be willing to reward them for their hard work and demonstrate your appreciation for them. Employees are far more likely to be engaged and work harder if they feel like their contributions are valued by the business. The forms that the rewards take are entirely up to you. For the most part, incentives like bonus schemes, flexi-time, paid days off and public acknowledgement of successes are often the most popular forms of reward. Recognising achievements and celebrating accomplishments are key.

Finding the Line Between Autonomy and Teamwork

No one wants to work with someone breathing down their neck all of the time. Employees value freedom in the workplace. They want to know that they are trusted to work autonomously. Autonomy also begets accountability; employees are much more invested in the outcome because they know that they are going to be held accountable for the work that they have turned in under their own steam. That being said, fostering connections within the team is also important. Your team is likely to need to collaborate and work together on occasion. You should facilitate teamwork and encourage it when necessary. 

The Bottom Line

Your employees are invaluable to your business, and they deserve to be treated as such. In striving to demonstrate your appreciation and your employee's value to them, you are likely to be aiding in increasing employee engagement anyway. That being said, if you want a few sure-fire strategies to implement, then keep the list above in mind. For the most part, you don't have to go overboard. You simply have to view your employees as well-rounded individuals with their own lives, thoughts and feelings as opposed to one-dimensional tools for the betterment of your business.