It’s important for your business to engage with your staff members effectively. By doing this, you can improve loyalty and improve your retention rate.
This guide explores how your business can go about improving your approach to
What is employee engagement?
It’s a process of understanding the qualitative (the quality of something) and quantitative (quantity) relationship between your business and the employees working for you.
The general belief is an engaged employee is one who is happy within their work and eager to stay on with your business.
Characteristics of a member of staff with high levels of engagement include:
- A positive attitude—enthusiasm.
- Willingness to go the extra mile with projects.
- Presenteeism (although this can lead to burnout, so you shouldn’t encourage too much of this).
- Eager to take on training courses.
- Long-term commitment to your business.
- Applying for promotions.
- Consistently meeting KPIs and providing a high quality of work.
A disengaged staff member will be the opposite of the above. They’ll put minimal effort into their work, potentially have a history of absenteeism, and may be job hunting for a new role on company time.
The logic here is that with happy and engaged employees you’ll be more productive as a business. So it’s an important issue to focus on.
Employee engagement and retention are linked—the chances are the happier your employees are, the higher the chance is they’ll stay with you. Let’s take a look into how you can do that.
How to achieve employee engagement
The idea came about in management theory during the 1990s. And in recent times, with focus on employee assistance programs and better work-life balance, many businesses have turned into the concept into a central pursuit.
As a result, employee engagement, motivation, and support is recommended.
And there are various ways to go about it. HR is an effective route to take to ensure that you can come up with the right strategies.
Employee engagement in human resource management works in various ways.
- Managerial leadership.
- Activities
The latter point is essential as you do need to monitor the happiness of employees in your business. And there’s an effective way to approach that, asides from regular reviews to monitor employee progress.
Creating your employee engagement strategy plan
Employees aren’t just interested in money, they also want other perks in their day-to-day working life.
Other important considerations include:
- Meaningful work.
- Feeling respected and valued.
- A sense of security in their job.
Don’t ignore the manager’s role in employee engagement. They’re essential in monitoring the above and providing staff members with KPIs, feedback, and overseeing any of their concerns.
They’ll be implementing your strategies. So you can follow the below practices and introduce them across your business:
- Use surveys to monitor what your employees are thinking, then hold a team meeting to discuss the results with your managers.
- Act upon any grievances that are aired, such as a need for flexible work patterns to avoid the worst of the commutes. Show them you’re listening by responding to these.
- Hold regular 1-1s. A weekly meeting allows them to air any issues they have and resolve them quickly and effectively.
- Train your managers in emotional awareness so they can learn to spot the signs of unhappy employees within your business. Then you can move to address this as soon as possible.
Of course, as part of your strategy you can alter your steps as you see fit.
It’s your business and you may note there are different avenues you can take to ensure you’re properly meeting your workforce’s needs.
Using an employee engagement survey
To keep an eye on employee engagement and wellbeing, you can turn to digital questionnaires to see what the overall state of mind is.
These, of course, are confidential and allow your employee to respond truthfully. And it’s important that they do, otherwise you end up with results that don’t reflect reality.
But why conduct an engagement survey? As well as being cost-effective, it’s an efficient way to amass responses from your entire workforce—all they need to do is take a few minutes to respond.
From their responses, you can consider employee engagement factors that could provide a boost to morale. This may include:
- A flexible schedule for a better work-life balance.
- Regular salary reviews.
- Perks, such as Christmas bonuses or free breakfasts.
- Car sharing schemes to make commutes easier.
- Training opportunities to further professional development.
- Employee engagement and employee satisfaction surveys, so they know their opinion is heard.
An employee engagement assessment is straightforward to setup, you can find many around online.
It’s up to you how often you send it, but once a month is usually a good idea. The questions you ask can relate to daily life in and around your business.
The average cost of employee engagement surveys is low. Some are free, but you can pay a small amount to unlock a more impressive survey.
Using employee engagement training
This term has become increasingly popular, but refers to your managers and directors. Is there a requirement for training to make sure you can properly engage your staff?
Training opportunities are present for a wide range individuals, including:
- Managing directors.
- Line managers.
- Business directors.
It’s important they’re able to convey the values of your business to employees and ensuring they contribute to the frame work you have in place for your future.
Training can include developing better emotional awareness, or learning more about what makes employees happy in this era of the business world.
By understanding the needs, you can greatly increase teamwork, communication, and productivity levels.
Need help?
If you’re struggling with how to define your strategy to reap the benefits, then you can contact us for immediate assistance: 0818 923 923.
