Have you been struggling to attain the employee engagement levels that you want from your workforce? If yes, there is no need to panic. Every organization deals with employee engagement in its own unique way. There are many strategies that you can implement to improve your company culture and engagement levels.
With a bit of planning and strategic decision-making, you can take your employee engagement to the next level. And better engagement can foster productivity, profitability, and retention.
Before we begin, what is employee engagement? We can define it in a nutshell as calculating an employee's motivation, passion, and dedication to work. It's an employee's degree of commitment to a company and the emotional connectivity they show all along the way. Although employee engagement can be difficult to promote, it's worth it in the end.
How Can You Increase Employee Engagement?
There are plenty of ways through which you can encourage your employees to work efficiently. Here are nine ways you can improve employee engagement.
1. Focus on Core Values
Giving your teams something to focus on can be very beneficial. Your company culture depends on sticking to your mission statement and core values. Your first step should involve creating a list of core values and training every employee on what they mean. When you do so, you can guarantee that your employees will become more engaged.
2. Feedback Prioritization
Enable check-ins for every employee while encouraging your middle management to bring in regular team review sessions to improve employee engagement.
Initially, you might be tempted to implement company-wide feedback scheduling, but every team has a different perspective. Frequent touchpoints might not seem natural to some people, while others will want weekly check-ins. Every manager should talk at their direct reports while receiving feedback.
3. Let Middle Management Engage
The level of engagement shown by middle management has a direct effect on the team. Ensuring your middle management engages effectively with your employees can have a major impact on your team.
Every manager has to get their team up and running. The manager should imbibe a friendly approach and set a tone for a higher engagement level. Encourage your managers to share best practice advice with their teams about how they can become more involved in the company.
4. Offer Volunteering Opportunities
Most people value working for a company that gives back to society. When your employees are connected through volunteering activities, they will find a sense of fulfillment while working together.
Whether its charitable activities or environmental improvement activities, give your employees access to volunteer somewhere, join hands, and impact society. Your organization can even start an online campaign for a specific cause and bring a bigger community together to serve a need.
5. Prioritize physical and mental health
Every organization should look for ways to increase the physical and mental well-being of every employee. It's time to sponsor online workout classes or meditation classes with fitness subsidies to encourage a healthy employee lifestyle. A heathier workforce leads to a happier, more productive workforce.
6. Reward top-performing employees
As an employer, you can start an employee recognition program to promote recognition at every level of your organization. If your organization offers incentives and rewards to top-performing employees, then there's a really high chance that employees will become more engaged. Some well-deserved recognition and a word of applause from management can boost individual's morale to the next level.
7. Conduct engagement surveys
When you deploy frequent employee engagement surveys, you will understand what does and does not work well in your organization. When you provide every individual with an offer to speak about how they feel at work, it leads to open and productive communication. This ensures your employees feel heard and valued.
8. Enhance your onboarding process
Many employees lose interest and disengage during the first few weeks of their onboarding because it can be tedious and repetitive. Make sure that you are keeping it interesting while welcoming new employees aboard and sharing all crucial company knowledge with them. And be sure to go a bit easy on them during this time.
9. Be flexible
Ensure that you leave space for work-life balance, which every employee is fond of. No one wants to completely sacrifice their personal life just for the sake of their work. Providing flexible work options and accommodating different needs will go a long way in keeping your employees on their toes to bring the needed success to your business.
Following these methods can exponentially improve your business' success and encourage all your employees to work at their best potential.
About the Author: Pawan Kumar is a Content Marketer at Springworks, which makes recruitment, onboarding, and employee engagement seamless and intelligent with empathy. He has been featured in many reputed publications! He’s an avid reader and movie buff. Don't hesitate to connect with him on Twitter.
