There are natural advantages for business competitors who prioritize increasing employee engagement and tracking the progress of their efforts. But, “employee engagement” is often misunderstood, improperly defined, and ineffectively pursued. Some leaders may also be uncertain about the skills they need to sustain the engagement of their team members. Let’s look at some ways to increase employee engagement, including developing an environment that is conducive to it and what management must actively do to foster it.
What is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is a worker’s degree of commitment to his/her role in the company and to the business’s endeavor to accomplish its goals and fulfill its expressed mission. The universally recognized advantages of having team members who are engaged in this way have made increasing employee engagement a top priority for the most competitive business leaders.
12 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement
Multiple performance metrics reflect the results of initiatives to increase employee engagement. Just a few of those are individual and team productivity rates, product and service quality, employee satisfaction, and staff turnover rates.
Here are a dozen of the best tips for increasing employee engagement at your commercial pavement sweeping business:
- Express the importance of each individual’s role to the business’s mission.
- Celebrate team and individual achievements.
- Provide employees with the tools necessary for success.
- Acknowledge people when you are spending time in their work area.
- Create a safe environment for workers to freely express their concerns.
- Consistently show appreciation for good efforts.
- Identify and eliminate impediments to employees’ success.
- Demonstrate patience, listen, and encourage workers to talk and not just listen.
- Allocate time for every worker to contribute suggestions and feedback.
- Provide a clear process for problem-solving.
- Enable people to collaborate on projects and function autonomously on tasks.
- Provide employee development time and resources.
Problems Increasing Employee Engagement
Effectively fostering worker engagement calls for insights into the individual goals that motivate the people on your staff. Without making the effort to build a positive rapport with the workers, you can expect a workplace culture of minimal caring about the company’s best interests.
These are among the most common problems that lead to low engagement among workers:
- Poor listening skills: When people feel ignored and frustrated that their opinions and ideas are not valued, they naturally disengage and refocus their priorities elsewhere.
- Poor speaking skills: If objectives, strategic plans, milestones, and expectations are unclear, overcoming challenges and maintaining transparency is more difficult.
- Disrespectful leadership: A rigid or dismissive manager who shows a lack of trust or confidence in employees, or makes excessive demands will disengage workers.
- Extreme kindness: People pleasers may be too fearful of people leaving to provide clear expectations or the necessary feedback for workers to stay engaged and succeed.
- Displaying indifference: Failing to recognize workers’ value and lacking interest in them breaks the sense of team connection necessary for optimal staff engagement.
Basic Employee Engagement Development Plan
If you have assessed your organization’s internal culture and found that there is a general lack of commitment to the business among your team members, it’s probably time to take measures to cultivate greater engagement of workers with their roles, your leadership team, and your company.
Here are some fundamentals for obtaining the kinds of information you will need for planning a successful program to boost employee engagement:
- Canvass the team: Ask your staff what they like and don’t like about their jobs, how they think things could be improved, and anything else on their minds regarding their workplace.
- One-on-one: Schedule individual meetings with each employee to talk about how they are doing with their work responsibilities, teammates, occupational goals, and other job matters.
- Track resolution of issues: List all the problems and possible solutions you are considering pursuing. Number the priorities and then sort those by their relative level of ease to resolve.
- Management self-development: Start by reading the material featured on the Additional Resources list below, and read other leadership learning content on employee engagement.
Benefits of Increased Employee Engagement
The critical business benefits of fostering employee engagement in modern companies are indisputable. In virtually every area of business performance, engagement is an essential factor.
Just some of the key benefits of increasing worker engagement include:
- Increased talent retention rates: A fully engaged staff constitutes a company culture to which top talent wants to belong and target market members trust to provide great service.
- Improved quality: Well-engaged staff members show a stronger interest in the business’s success and are more concerned about how to help the company instead of being only interested in their personal performance.
- Improved brand reputation: Fully engaged workers demonstrate commitment to their roles and the business’s mission. This is a transformative force in developing a winning brand image in the market.
- Increased profitability: Engaged employees strive to exceed expectations. They work to create solutions, support management, collaborate with each other, and show enthusiasm and professionalism to customers.
Keeping Workers Engaged Long-Term
In a work environment where employees are thriving in their roles, you can expect to find that they are operating in conditions that foster high levels of worker engagement. In such a workplace, you will likely discover that management demonstrates respect for people and reasonable expectations.
That means the business’s leader has adopted the practical habits discussed above, as required for good team management. And, where you find management applying these core employee engagement principles, you can expect to find a strong pro-company workplace culture reflected across the company’s key performance indicators.
Additional Resources
Engaging Employees Starts with Remembering What Your Company Stands For, Harvard Business Review, Retrieved 2-22-2019 from https://hbr.org/2018/03/engaging-employees-starts-with-remembering-what-your-company-stands-for
Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work: Build a Culture of Employee Engagement, Marciano, ISBN-13: 978-07-171401-3
Five Steps To Drive Employee Engagement And Business Growth, Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/04/20/five-steps-to-drive-employee-engagement-and-business-growth/#41f69c1c4e2f