How do your employees feel about their job? An engaged workforce is productive, and they stay with their employers for longer. High engagement rates with your employees also mean they enjoy working at the company, and they’re more likely to recommend friends and family, easing your hiring process.
However, disengaged employees drag your business down the tubes. Disengagement leads to lower levels of productivity, and many employees will leave you for the competition.
Business leaders need to increase employee engagement to gain a competitive edge. Here are a few tips to help you improve your company culture, driving productivity in your workforce while improving employee retention.
1. Measure Employee Engagement
Put together a questionnaire for your employees. In the questionnaire, focus your questions on gauging employee competencies.
Use this tool to discover if your employees understand their job and where they need help. Establishing metrics helps you identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in your team.
2. Create an Engagement Strategy
A robust engagement program can connect your departments, avoiding “silos.” Create an engagement survey, and focus on constant communication with your employees, with regular feedback to help employees develop.
3. Set expectations
Your employees need to know what you expect of them in the workplace. In many companies, employers and managers don’t communicate expectations to employees clearly, resulting in frustration.
4. Motivate Your Employees
Send out an office poll asking your employees what motivates them to perform at work. Understanding their motivation allows you to create incentives in your employee experience that improve employee engagement.
5. Set an Example
Executives and managers need to lead by example. If there’s a disengaged manager on your team, then their attitude might trickle down to lower-level employees, ruining your employee engagement while slowing productivity.
6. Create Regular Feedback Loops
Feedback is essential if you want to maintain peak levels of employee engagement. Make sure that your company has a means of communicating with employees.
Your engagement strategy needs to include a platform where employees can express concerns and ideas to management. Always leave your office door open to foster a culture of openness.
7. Bring Management On Board
Managers are central to your engagement strategy. The best managers help their teams excel in the workplace, while incompetent managers can ruin your employee experience and slow productivity. Managers require as much training as employees, with a focus on leadership qualities and training.
8. Conduct “Stay” Interviews
Many companies conduct exit interviews to help staff move on while understanding why they left the company. However, few companies decide to take the initiative to hold “stay” interviews. Research shows that employees start looking for greener pastures after around 2-years of employment.
By conducting regular “stay” interviews with your team, you can uncover their motivation, addressing their needs as an employee.
9. Keep the Engagement Going
Quarterly meetings aren’t enough to increase your employee engagement. You need to host regular feedback sessions with your employees if you want to boost engagement, and once every quarter won’t be sufficient to stay informed about concerns and ideas from your team.
10. Practice for Perfection
Your employee engagement strategy plays a significant role in developing the culture of your organization. However, you need to keep implementing and practicing the ideas mentioned in this article if you want to get the most out of your workforce. Practice makes perfect.
