Seeking employee engagement strategies to boost employee productivity? Employee engagement measures how enthusiastic, passionate, and committed a worker is to their job. An engaged employee doesn’t just work for a paycheck. Instead, they’re passionate about their job and want to make a meaningful impact to the company they work for.
Engaged employees tend to contribute more to their organization, believe in the company’s goals, and strive to uplift themselves and those around them. If your employees appear unmotivated or apathetic, you should consider implementing employee engagement strategies to drive business success.
Why is Employee Engagement Important?
Employee engagement has been identified as a key driver of a company’s overall financial performance. With labour costs accounting for nearly 70% of total business expenses, it’s vital that employees feel engaged so as not to negatively impact profits. Additional costs related to recruiting, hiring, and onboarding can be easily avoided through simple and affordable employee engagement strategies. Well-planned strategies can boost morale, passion, and participation, in turn reducing turnover.
Employee engagement is also important because it drives workplace performance. In addition, engaged workers feel a greater sense of loyalty to the company they’re employed with. While engagement is trending upwards, only one in five Canadian employees currently report feeling engaged in their work. This means that four in five employees are watching the clock (or more likely – unwilling to contribute above and beyond!)
As such, there’s much room for improvement in the working world, and likely for your business! So how do you get started? Luckily for you, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best employee engagement strategies that you can use within your workplace.
Employee Engagement Strategies for your workplace
1. Conduct a Survey
Before you draft a strategy to increase employee engagement, you need to know where you currently stand. To get started, you can easily measure engagement with an employee engagement survey. The questions asked should cover your employees’ everyday experiences, how they interact with management, and their feelings towards the overall company mission.
After analyzing the results of the survey, you’ll be able to identify areas where you need the most improvement.
2. Give Employees Proper Training
Training employees properly in their respective work areas will go a long way to boost interest in daily tasks. Training is a well known employee engagement strategy that empowers employees. Furthermore, specialized training encourages employees to lead change in their organization through a deeper understanding of their work.
Begin by helping employees draw a clear connection between training and career succession. When workers feel they’ve been given the tools to succeed, they will feel a greater sense of responsibility for their own accomplishments. As a manager, consider assessing the skills of your employees and implementing training programs for necessary areas of development.
3. Task Meaningful Work
We get it, nothing is more draining than your time feeling meaningless. Everyone has dealt with that feeling from time to time, and knows how it can lead to a downward spiral of disengagement. Managers should check in with employees regularly to understand how they feel about their daily tasks. If employees fell indifferent to their work, consider adjusting tasks to better reflect their goals, skills, and interests.
4. Offer Flexible Working Hours
Studies show flexible working hours boosts productivity. In 2022, flexible working hours have become more common among companies prioritizing work-life balance. With the freedom to choose their own hours, employees can pick the time of day when they’re most productive. In addition, flexibility helps reduce stress and prevent burnout, which are two major factors contributing to disengagement.
According to a Gartner survey, 43% of respondents said that flexibility in working hours helped them achieve greater productivity. As such, you should consider whether your organization can offer flexible working hours as it may increase employee engagement efforts.
5. Promote Workplace Bonding Activities
Engaging employees through regular team building activities can help build a sense of community, and increase interest in work. With so many workforces operating remotely, virtual team building activities have picked up as a popular option for battling burnout. After all, the more fun your employees have at work, the more dedicated they’ll be to their tasks and goals! Remote or in-person, consider planning activities such as office games, theme days, or lunch socials.
6. Revamp Your Office Space
Would you feel more engaged in a cubicle office environment, or a bright workspace with ample space to work collaboratively? As a starting point, consider giving your workspace a makeover, or finding a new space that better promotes collaboration and creativity. Altogether, a space that feels clean, bright, and modern will increase employee enthusiasm to be at work, also contributing to better engagement.
#WorkplaceWellness Tip! 🔔
— CloudAdvisors (@cloudadvisorsCA) May 25, 2022
We’re best able to set ourselves up for healthy practices at work when our office environment supports positive working. If you work from home, try creating an intentional workspace like Diane's (pets optional 🐶). pic.twitter.com/EdS548t4rA
7. Provide Incentives and Perks
If you want employees to come to work and go above and beyond, don’t you think you should too? Offering employee perks in addition to a well benchmarked benefit plan is critical to employee happiness. For example, perks such as gym memberships, education programs, healthcare spending accounts, mental health apps, and catered lunches will let them know that you’re looking after their professional and personal wellbeing. Simultaneously, simple office amenities such as good coffee, outdoor spaces, and easy parking access will make the workday more enjoyable.
8. Keep Communication Open
Transparency is key! You can’t build trust with secrets and poor communication. Being open in the workplace builds trust, which leads to stability and a sense of belonging. While it may be obvious to a manager why a certain task needs to get done, it’s not always apparent to employees. For this reason, transparency allows employees to see how their function in the business contributes to both stakeholders’ and the team’s overall goals.
Holding regular check-in meetings with employees, allowing employees the opportunity to ask questions, and building a safe space for discussion are all great starting points. Above all, remember to listen to your employees and make them feel heard.
7. Demonstrate Employee Appreciation
No employee likes spending their days working hard without receiving the appreciation they deserve. In order to increase employee engagement, it’s important to recognize and appreciate your employees’ efforts. For example, a small gesture such as a personalized email acknowledging their contributions can go a long way.
When you feel an employee has done a good job, it’s important to acknowledge their efforts regardless of the size of the task. Compliments, acknowledgements of effort, and additional perks or time off can easily improve an employee’s attitude.
10. Team Accountability
Are your employees suffering from burnout? Although engaged employees will go the extra mile, expecting them to perform above and beyond all the time is unsustainable. All employees require downtime, and therefore tasks should remain evenly distributed among all employees. In other words, heavily relying on the efforts of engaged employees to cover the work of their peers is not feasible.
Rather, management should work to hold everyone accountable and responsible for their work. Employees should feel a sense of responsibility to their peers and understand how their work affects their team.
