Engaged employees feel valued and take personal pride in their organization as an extension of themselves. They work harder, show up on time, stay longer, and even encourage their colleagues to do the same. Here are five core ways to encourage employee engagement in your organization:
1. Focus on Experience, Not Engagement
Employee experience starts with your organization’s ability to help employees easily connect, understand, and utilize the range of tools and services available to them.
What are an employee’s pain points interacting across the organization?
- Trouble finding benefits information?
- Accomplishing simple tasks is time consuming and burdensome?
- Too many disconnected systems?
Unifying tools and access into a homebase that both feels pertinent and is easy to use is the key.
Gone are the days of simply launching a new intranet page and hoping that the links continue to work and the information is relevant.
Now you can build systems that adapt to each employee making sure they have the tools they need when they need them with up to date information and links.
2. Recognition from all sides in all sizes
One of the top reasons employees leave their work is because they do not feel appreciated.
- Employees need to know their efforts are recognized and valued
- Employee recognition isn’t one-size-fits-all
- Money isn’t the only, or even the top, form of recognition
In a recent Gallup survey, employees highlighted five of the top ways they prefer to be recognized for their hard work.
- Private recognition from their boss, peers, or customers
- Public acknowledgment and recognition
- Receiving achievements through positive reviews and valuations
While the form of recognition matters, the when is just as important as the how. Having systems in place that allow for organic recognition and reward of employees throughout the year leads to a more sustained culture of feeling valued.
3. Understand Employee Engagement through Business Outcomes
Engagement as a general concept is a difficult metric to define and track. The trick is to try to understand engagement through watching business outcomes, which can create a virtuous loop as engagement efforts pay off directly in business terms.
According to a report by Gallup, defining the relationship between employee engagement and performance in any organization is doable and that while the metrics used to measure employee engagement and performance vary with industry the concept holds.
Some areas to consider tracking versus your engagement efforts include:
- Customer ratings
- Safety incidents
- Productivity
- Employee turnover
- Absenteeism
- Profitability
- Quality (defects)
- Shrinkage (theft)
Having the right systems to test processes and tactics for engagement is key as you start your journey.
4. Make Engagement an Ongoing Practice
Employee engagement is not a one-off event but a perpetual practice that a business must incorporate into company culture to reap maximum benefits. Long-term the mindset needs to shift regarding how management connects with the employee experience.
Here are five ideas that can help your organization develop and implement a holistic and ongoing employee engagement experience:
- Rethink employee engagement. It does not have to be all about long questionnaires, annual surveys, or holiday season giveaways.
- Consider engagement as a strategic business process and align it with company culture.
- Incorporate recognition, learning, and development in the employee engagement strategy.
- Include company leadership in employee engagement. Management must demonstrate the benefits of investing in employee engagement initiatives.
- Simplify the engagement processes by providing flexible work environments and encouraging healthy work-life balance.
Fortunately, we live in an age full of invaluable tools that employers can use to simplify work, decrease employee stress, and foster engagement.
5. Use an Employee Engagement Platform
Every forward-looking company should look into using a platform to simplify and streamline its employee engagement efforts. Technology Advice lists investing in an employee engagement platform as the first of the top six ways a company can boost its employee productivity and ultimately profitability in 2021.
An employment engagement platform is a software tool that organizations use to necessitate interaction, improve job satisfaction, and retain talented workers. Look for a platform that lets your organization customize the features and tools to fit your HR programs.
With such a tool, companies can deliver valuable and quantifiable engagement metrics that will help them optimize the performance and satisfaction of every employee.
How an Employee Experience Platform Can Help
Refresh is a single interoperable platform designed for HR departments. It features a ton of tools that organizations can use to organize, integrate, and communicate with their staff. Built to offer an omnichannel user-centric experience, the Refresh Platform is modular and data-driven, highly customizable, and tailored for maximum engagement.
If you are looking for an employee engagement platform that works, you have to try the set of integrated tools and modules that come with the Refresh Platform.
Some of the core features of the Refresh Platform include:
- Engagement & Onboarding
- Universal Scheduling
- Dynamic Videos
- Nutrition Tracking, Rewards & Perks
- Insurance
- Reimbursement
Employee Experience Matters
Employee engagement is more important now than ever, considering the troves of workers leaving their places of work. Your business must develop a culture that incorporates employee engagement at its core. However, this does not mean you have to start from scratch; it is 2021, and there are tools that can help. Visit the Refresh Platform to discover more about employee engagement and learn how best to implement it in your organization.