Employee engagement is essential to the success of any business. It affects everything from productivity and morale, to turnover rates and can dramatically cut back.
Help employees gain insight into their own motivations and passions, then encourage them to tailor roles and tasks so that they complement their individual strengths more closely.
Engage team-building activities outside of the office. A ping-pong table or bank of couches can help boost engagement among teammates by encouraging socializing together.
1. Invest in Your People
People are the core of your company, so keeping them satisfied and motivated should be at the center of all short- and long-term goals. Here are a few innovative methods of doing just that:
Give employees the power to choose their own benefits. By creating a forum where employees can come up with creative suggestions for company benefits like pizza vending machines or daycare programs, employees will feel empowered while simultaneously improving workplace experience.
Employees looking to expand their professional knowledge should be offered training opportunities. This can give them a sense of progressing professionally, which may contribute to greater satisfaction with their roles at your company.
2. Take Care of Their Wellbeing
Employees whose companies prioritize their wellbeing are more likely to be productive and satisfied in their jobs, which includes providing stress management programs, mental health sessions and financial planning services as health-related benefits.
Promote work-life balance and permit flexible working hours for employees. Many workers claim they lose motivation to work when unable to balance both home life and professional responsibilities in a satisfactory way.
Companies that prioritize wellbeing by offering activities like meditation classes, fitness subsidies, healthy snack options in the office and nudges/reminders can increase employee engagement while simultaneously decreasing absenteeism and overworking. These initiatives may even help prevent absenteeism.
3. Create a Positive Work Environment
An engaging work environment is central to employee wellness and can significantly increase engagement and motivation, leading to improved productivity.
One way to foster a productive working environment is giving employees opportunities to pursue personal interests within the workplace, such as training with or shadowing colleagues from another department.
Positive work environments feature open communication among employees and upper management, allowing employees to pose questions and receive answers that help them develop professionally.
4. Offer Training and Development Opportunities
An investment in learning and development opportunities can be an excellent way to engage employees, showing that a company cares about investing in its employees’ success and wants them to stay. Furthermore, this may help reduce turnover rates as employees will likely remain loyal when they know that their employer cares about them and is invested in them.
Managers play an invaluable role in employee engagement, so be sure they possess the soft skills required to captivate their teams.
Celebrating professional achievements is another effective way to increase employee engagement. This can be accomplished via team happy hours, special events or public acknowledgment on social media.
5. Give Your Employees a Voice
Employees want to feel valued when participating in high-level meetings, especially anonymously. A token suggestion box won’t do the job – employees need their ideas implemented quickly.
Assuring that all employees understand your core values is vital to encouraging actions aligned with them and upholding your mission statement. For instance, if your company boasts a robust philanthropic mission statement, make it known and encourage donations outside of work as part of this.
Provide regular one-to-one check-ins with managers so that employees can share their concerns directly, while still contributing them into wider dialogue.
6. Encourage Personal Growth
Showing employees you care for them as individuals is another effective way to boost engagement. Offering flexible working arrangements allowing employees to finish work when it best fits their schedule (for instance, to pick up kids from school or attend fitness classes) as well as encouraging personal projects outside the office can ensure a good work-life balance, which in turn drives employee satisfaction and retention.
Encourage your employees to explore other areas of the company by shadowing other employees in different departments, which will enable them to develop their skills further while broadening their experiences while improving team morale.
7. Reward Your Employees
As a business leader, you understand the importance of hiring high-performing employees who will propel your company to greater heights while producing higher volumes of quality work and leading to increased revenues.
However, to retain top performers requires more than simply base pay alone. Your employees need to feel like their work matters to the overall success of the company and they want a sense that their contribution makes an impactful statement about them and about you as an employer.
Rewards and recognition can help to encourage employee engagement; just make sure to avoid gifts that go against your business goals or are counterintuitive.
