Did you know that 85% of workers aren’t engaged in the workplace? A 2021 study reveals that 73% of employees would consider leaving their jobs for better offers.
Unfortunately, this willingness to change jobs isn’t strictly money-related, as a further 74% of younger workers wouldn’t mind a pay cut to take up an opportunity at their ideal jobs. The current generation of employees seeks job opportunities that make them feel engaged and fulfilled.
What is employee engagement, and why does it matter to you? According to a workplace engagement study, low-staff engagement costs enterprises $450-$500 billion each year in the US.
How your organization treats its employees affects their productivity and your company’s bottom line. Therefore, understanding employee engagement and how to improve it is critical to avoid its adverse effects. Read below to better understand employee engagement and how to improve employee engagement in the workplace.
What is Employee Engagement?
In a nutshell, employee engagement is the involvement and enthusiasm of employees as they perform their tasks in the workplace. Employee engagement is also the degree to which a company’s staff is motivated by, passionate about, and invested in their work.
On a more personal scope, engagement showcases an individual’s commitment to the organization and their emotional connection to colleagues. It is often easy for most organizations to confuse employee engagement with job satisfaction.
However, while both concepts share a few similarities, employee engagement tends to be more complicated. This is because employee engagement is often influenced by factors such as job culture, location, and individual characteristics.
Employee engagement can also differ from employee success.
How is Employee Engagement Different from Employee Success
For most organizations, employee success largely remains an elusive term. Professionals often compare employee success to customer success and emphasize the significance of allowing the best employee experience in every stage of an employee’s lifecycle.
Employee success is often perceived as a collection of initiatives and actions that allow employees to do their job in the best way possible. In summary, employee success is the proactive allowance of the best employee experience throughout the employee lifecycle. Employee success includes strategic planning on how to support employees in a manner that enables them to perform their best work while facilitating a higher engagement and productivity level.
A thin line lies between employee engagement and employee success. On the one hand, employee engagement targets an employee’s enthusiasm and emotional connection with colleagues. On the other hand, employee success focuses on the technical aspects of ensuring an employee remains productive and engaged.
Why is Employee Engagement Important?
Your employees take action and make decisions that affect your workforce and company. How you treat employees and how employees treat each other can influence their actions positively or place your organization at risk.
Benefits of optimal employee engagement include:
- Improved team performance
- Increased employee productivity
- Increased employee retention and reduced turnover rates
- Fast and satisfying achievement of team objectives
- Reduced workplace stress
- Lower risks of burnout
- Reduced employee absenteeism.
Managing employee engagement can also increase your business’s productivity in the long run.
Whose Responsibility is It to Manage Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is a joint effort and not strictly an HR responsibility. However, it is worth noting that engagement starts from the top. Despite this, it is a model that anyone can take part in.
Managers are largely responsible for managing employee engagement. Managers influence the organization’s environment and culture. They ought to set a framework where employees can thrive and succeed while feeling motivated and engaged.
Besides managerial efforts, parties that can help guarantee employee engagement include:
- Senior leaders
- HR
- Employees
The employee role in helping manage employee engagement includes providing actionable feedback about what works for them and what doesn’t. They can also brainstorm solutions to elevate the employee experience.
What Should Be Part of An Employee Engagement Strategy?
Developing an employee engagement strategy requires you to be realistic, flexible, and clear about your responsibilities. However, when creating an effective employee engagement strategy, segment your strategy into two: one for new hires and one for long-term employees.
Employee Engagement Strategy for New Hires
- Optimize the connection between the recruitment process and the onboarding journey.
- Make the employee’s first day in your organization memorable.
- Create an easy and practical way for new hires to navigate all the internal systems.
- Enable pulse checks to generate and provide instant feedback
- Coach managers to share input regularly..
For Long-Term Hires
Organizations often make the mistake of piling up their efforts in creating positive experiences for new hires, neglecting the existing long-term workforce. Long-term employees have interacted in and within your organization and have first-hand experience of how your workplace affects their engagement levels.
Therefore, for an employee engagement strategy for long-term employees to be successful, there ought to be:
- Clear communication channels
- An environment of trust
- Recognition
- Leadership by example
- Encouragement
Balancing the focus on long-term employees makes them feel noticed and appreciated, and increases retention rates.
Steps to Improve Your Employee Engagement
Discovering new ways to improve employee engagement in an organization enhances creativity and allows HR and managers to implement strategies suitable to a specific workplace. To learn more about how to implement an effective employee engagement strategy, follow these steps below on how to improve employee engagement.
Build Trust for Starters
Trust is an integral tool to make employees feel appreciated, valued, and engaged. Without trust in a workplace, employees typically feel less valued and micromanaged.
By cultivating an environment filled with trust, employees start to value and enjoy their work, translating to improved productivity. Additionally, trust reinforces the idea of equality, allowing for seamless horizontal and vertical collaboration.
Ensure Clear Communications
Without proper communication, trust cannot be expressed within a workplace. Communication is fundamental for effectively sharing ideas, feedback, recommendations, and any vital aspect of a workplace.
As an integral part of daily living, communication connects people, allowing them to make plans effectively. Without proper communication, your employees may feel clueless and unsupported, thus increasing the likelihood of disengagement.
To ensure a motivated workforce, strive to maintain or improve clear lines of communication. Your organization’s strategy should ensure every employee is heard and listened to. The result is enhanced natural collaboration, leading them to feel more engaged.
Promote Employee Recognition
Employee recognition is an effective way to ensure high-performing staff constantly feel important and appreciated. 91% of HR professionals are confident that recognizing and rewarding employees make them more likely to stay.
Besides motivating employees, recognition of top-performing employees encourages other employees to work harder to achieve the same. Ultimately, their drive to be recognized gives them a sense of engagement. How do you promote employee recognition?
In a typical workplace, recognition from management can miss from time to time. On the bright side, you can foster peer-to-peer recognition. It is the act of acknowledging another employee’s talent, skills, and deliverables.
Peer-to-peer employee recognition encourages employee loyalty, satisfaction, and engagement. More importantly, peer-to-peer employee recognition increases collaboration, leading to improved engagement.
Encourage Interaction Among Employees
Interaction among employees fosters a friendly and understanding environment which makes collaboration easier. The workplace doesn’t have to be strictly about work.
By encouraging employee interaction on and off the workplace, communication and teamwork become integral to their professional lives. Strive to create events and communities and encourage attendance by employees from different departments. Other resulting benefits besides increased employee engagement are the sharing of ideas and employee recognition.
Improve Workplace Efficiency
One of the reasons employees are likely to be disengaged is working with inefficient tools, machinery, etc. Many employees don’t prefer feeling like they struggle to accomplish their tasks. Employees’ work quality gets affected if you work with outdated machinery and ineffective practices.
Your workplace systems should be designed to complement your employees’ efforts instead of making them strain and feel overworked. Conduct an overhaul of your current machinery, software, company practices, or any workplace aspect that feels less efficient.
Allow Your Employees to Have Autonomy
Employees will likely feel satisfied and in control of their work if they have autonomy in their job. In addition, they will feel more responsible and satisfied with their individual contributions.
Empower your employees to do what they believe is right for your organization. This way, employees will have the innate need to create their own story with the delegated power while remaining respectful and mindful of the company goals and values.
Focus on Employee Wellbeing–Understand and Care for Them
Employee engagement and wellbeing are interdependent. Making conscious efforts to be aware of your employees’ well-being motivates them to engage with their work.
The first step is to spend time getting to know your employees. Balance your focus between their professional and personal lives. By familiarizing yourself with their roles and feelings inside and outside of the company, you will create a meaningful relationship that encourages engaged workers.
Schedule regular check-ins. Implement an organization-wide wellness initiative that promotes employee wellbeing. The more your employees feel cared for and valued, the more likely they will reciprocate the concern in their efforts to meet your company goals.
Offer Employees Training and Learning Opportunities
The current employee generation wants opportunities for career and personal growth. Professional growth and development opportunities are more likely to retain an existing workforce and compel top talent to want to engage fully with and for your organization. How do you do so?
Offering education-reimbursement for organization-sanctioned training and courses motivates employees. Allowing your employees to advance their academic qualifications can be integral to your company culture.
By allowing your employees to acquire extra knowledge and skills, they become more inclined to stay and use their new skills to help scale company growth. Generally, learning and development initiatives help employees to feel valued and cared for. Additionally, offering training and learning opportunities while guaranteeing job security retains employees’ loyalty to your organization.
Encourage Transparency in the Workplace
Though almost similar, communication and transparency slightly differ. Ideally, transparency means your employees are fully aware of what happens within the organization. Be open about internal organizational challenges with your employees.
Such transparency levels breed trust levels. In addition, unlimited transparency brings employees together to brainstorm possible solutions to company challenges. It is important to note that openness should flow from the top.
Encourage Employee Feedback
Feedback is an essential tool that favors both a company’s organization and its employees. On the one hand, employees crave and appreciate feedback. According to a Joblist survey, a third of employees want regular feedback.
Feedback from management about their performance levels encourages employees to improve and put effort where needed. In this case, feedback could also mean recognition and awards. You can attach recognition and awards when providing feedback to your employees.
On the other hand, getting feedback from employees can provide great insight for the company while leaving employees feeling more appreciated and engaged. Allow your employees to be open with their thoughts and suggestion while being receptive to their feedback. Employees will contribute generously if they know you value their input.
You can collect employee feedback through several channels, including:
- Questionnaires
- Surveys (new employment surveys, new engagement surveys, pulse surveys, etc.)
- Stay interviews and exit interviews
- Review sites if your employees aren’t willing to share feedback directly (Glassdoor, Indeed, CareerBliss, etc.)
- Employee suggestion boxes
Through feedback, employees can also make suggestions on improvements that can help optimize their engagement.
Streamline Your Company Culture
In most cases, employees feel connected and engaged if they share a common goal and work culture. Common/shared culture in your workplace promotes business consistency and allows a company to benefit from a friendly and open work setting.
Streamlining your company culture also creates a fun and engaging work environment that favors higher employee retention rates and increased worker productivity. Additionally, a transparent work culture fosters trust between employees and management.
Offer Extra Benefits, Perks, and Privileges
Attracting and retaining top talent employees may require enticement via extra perks and privileges. These include:
- Equity packages
- Home office stipends
- Continuing education and training package
- Commuter benefits
- Gym memberships
Your new hires and existing workforce will be happy to enjoy an extra perk or two. By offering perks and privileges, you can help your employees improve their mental health, which is echoed in improved engagement.
Model Your Organization’s Core Values and Emphasize Your Mission
Employees are more likely to feel engaged if there is a goal that they can get behind and a purpose to inspire them. Your mission statement and core values are your company culture’s foundation, and the culture plays a central role in employee engagement.
Create a succinct list of core company values. That way, your employees will understand the significance of these values, their impact on your business, and your expectation of each employee. Lead by example and hold every employee accountable.
Foster Innovation
Employees are more likely to feel engaged and passionate about their jobs if they feel they can contribute to the organization meaningfully and use their personal skills to accomplish that. Bringing passion into a workplace is a significant improvement aspect when it comes to staff motivation.
Streamline Your Onboarding Process
Disengaging employees in their first few weeks at your workplace is very easy. To avoid losing top talent within their initial days in your organization, provide new hires with an effective onboarding process. That way, they will know they have a spot in your organization and company culture.
During the first few days or weeks, explain to your new hires the nuance of your teams, your company’s goals and values, and their job description. Not only does this set the new hires for success, but it also helps them convey their value to you. Streamline the onboarding process to welcome new hires and set the pace for employee engagement from the word go.
Allow Flexibility
The modern workplace is pacing towards remote offices, especially since the recent global health crisis. Remote work opportunities and flexible work schedules can help promote employee engagement.
Employees who have difficulty balancing work and personal lives require flexibility to avoid feeling overwhelmed. You can provide your employees with the ability to adjust their work hours to ensure a harmonious work-life balance.
Create a Psychologically Safe Work Environment
Behaviors tolerated within an organization form an integral part of work culture–good or bad. Ensure you create an open line to allow your employees to raise psychologically and mentally challenging issues within the workplace. By feeling psychologically protected, employees can perform better and become more engaged.
Employee Engagement Matters
Improving employee engagement involves streamlining your organization to increase enthusiasm among workers. Generally, employees have varying needs, thus requiring extra effort to ensure each employee’s concerns are addressed.
Additionally, new hires can help you improve your company’s productivity. However, it’s important to optimize employee engagement right off the bat. One way you can do so is by creating a seamless onboarding process.
Are you ready to get started on improving employee engagement? Refresh offers custom solutions that streamline many of the major HR processes for the modern enterprise. Reserve a demo today to learn more.