“Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it”-Timothy R. Clark.
Are your most valuable employees switching over to your competitors? Did you overhear an employee negotiating an interview?
These are all warning signs that your employees are probably disengaged at work. With 70% of US employees feeling miserable and disengaged at work, you need to stimulate employee engagement and find ways to keep your employees happy at the workplace.
Apart from reducing the attrition rate, employee engagement helps increase productivity, enhances customer relations, and results in high turnover.
But what is employee engagement?
Engagement is the attitude with which your employees perform their job. Employee engagement ensures that employees complete their work with dedication and interest while ensuring productivity and meeting business goasl.
In this article, we will discuss some ideas for engaging employees.
Top 7 Ideas to Engage your Employees in 2021
With COVID-19 creating havoc and shifting the majority of the workforce to the home office, engaging employees has never been more critical. Here are seven ways to engage your employees in 2021.
1. Create an employee-first culture
An employee-first culture is a work environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their opinions because their concerns and suggestions are heard and respected. In such a culture, your employees see growth opportunities, enjoy a work-life balance, remain happy because employers treat them fairly and believe in your company’s core values.
Fostering such a culture builds your employee’s trust, increases satisfaction, and enhances engagement. Happier employees work smarter and harder to achieve common business goals. Additionally, such a culture can bloom only when employees feel cared for and respected, even by top-level management.
Though it may seem an uphill battle to bring a paradigm shift in your company’s culture, it’s a great way to retain the top talent and ensure long-term success.
How to create an employee-first culture
- Ensure you hear every employee’s voice
- Make everyone feel safe at work
- Foster transparency and encourage two-way communication
- Create a fun and friendly workplace
- Recognize top talent
- Build empathy with employees
- Encourage employees to maintain a work-life balance
2. Foster employee communication
Companies that are low on employee communication find it difficult to retain employees. Employee communication is the building block for creating a collaborative and fruitful work environment. Therefore, it’s essential to focus on communication.
Always remember that every employee communication is a two-way street. You must be willing to listen to them and talk to them to understand their concerns and pain points. Employee communication helps boost employee engagement, increase workplace productivity, and drives business growth. In short words, communication is the most important cornerstone for employee engagement.
How to foster employee communication
- Create a strategic internal communication plan
- Increase frequency of communication with employees
- Invest in robust communication channels
- Focus on two-way communication among all departments
- Establish a workplace where employees can voice their concern
3. Recognize and reward employees
Rewards and recognition are two things that fuel the energy of hardworking employees, and it encourages them to perform to their best abilities. When you reward employees, it increases employee motivation level, and they constantly strive to achieve more. But when you amplify their happiness by acknowledging their efforts publicly, you’re successful in creating a loyal employee. Furthermore, such employees go the extra mile to achieve your business goals.
According to a study, 88% of employees agree that their employers should reward employees for their excellent work. This makes it essential to have a reward program in your company.
How to recognize and reward employees
- Create standard metrics and allot points for each task completed
- Allot points based on the complexity of the task
- Make the reward program transparent
- At every month or quarter-end shortlist best performing employees
- Select the most deserving employee and reward them publicly
4. Incorporate ‘stay’ interviews
There is nothing worse than losing a valuable employee. You cannot wait for employees to switch to understand why they’re pursuing other employment opportunities. This is where stay meetings come into the picture. You conduct these interviews way before your employees consider changing their jobs.
These interviews are not with employees who are leaving the company. Instead, it’s an in-person meeting with high-performing employees having a long association with your company. Such an interview is a great way to uncover what part of their role and company keeps the employee coming back every day to work. It also helps discover the potential reasons why even the most engaged employee decided to quit your company.
Stay interviews are an excellent engagement strategy because it helps you resolve employee problems before they become full-blown problems. These interviews help companies improve their work environment and retain the top talent.
How to conduct a stay interview
- Decide who will conduct the stay interview (it’s usually the employee’s direct manager)
- Choose a high-performing employee for the interview
- Select an appropriate location for the interview
- Decide on when to conduct the stay interview
- Prepare questions to ask the employee
5. Respect your employees
Greeting coworkers in the workplace may seem like a challenge for many employees. By saying ‘Hello’ or ‘Good Morning,’ you show respect and acknowledge their presence. Greeting and treating every employee with respect is one of the most meaningful ways to boost employee engagement.
With more than half of employees not feeling respected by their managers or leaders, fostering a culture of respect is likely to turn your employee retention numbers in your favor. More than colleagues, employees expect respect from their managers, leaders, and upper management.
Giving respect is an important driver for satisfaction and engagement at the workplace. Also, it creates a fair environment where every employee is treated equally irrespective of their position.
How to respect your employees
- Control your actions and words
- Empathize with others
- Treat employees fairly and equally
- Talk with courtesy, kindness, and politeness
- Foster a culture of constructive criticism
- Include everyone in meetings, celebrations, and discussions
- Value opinions of all employees
6. Ask for employee feedback
Companies that value their ‘employee voice’ are the ones who witness an increase in their overall employee engagement. This is where employee feedback comes to your rescue. By asking for feedback, you showcase that you value the opinion of your employees.
Furthermore, when you take action based on the feedback received, you enhance employee engagement. With regular employee feedback, you eliminate significant reasons for employees to get disengaged and create a work environment where everyone performs to their best potential.
As work dynamics may change due to numerous reasons, soliciting quarterly or monthly feedback helps you keep track of your employees. Through these feedbacks, you can eliminate the problem at the starting point and make your employees committed to their work.
How to ask for employee feedback
- Focus on creating a formal employee survey
- Conduct town hall meetings
- Build an open suggestion box
- Conduct manager one-on-one interview
- Regardless of the method you choose to gather employee feedback, it’s critical to translate the feedback into action.
7. Make your employees the brand ambassador
In the constantly evolving workplace, employees play a much more significant role when it comes to branding. Today, a post on social media by an employee is likely to gather 561% more engagement than when the company shares the same message.
With so much on the table, it makes sense to make your employees the brand ambassador for your company.
But what are brand ambassadors?
Brand ambassadors are professionals you hire to promote your company positively to potential customers to increase awareness and profit.
When employees are your brand ambassadors, it increases your brand’s reach and improves employee productivity. Your employees can contextualize the benefits of your company like no paid advertisement can do. Your employees are the most trusted source of truth, your customers are likely to believe them. Posts and recommendations by employees are more authentic and believable.
How to make your employees the brand ambassador
- Keep your employees informed
- Encourage employees to share their personal experiences with others.
- Organize your content sharing efforts
- Organize different employee events
- Make employees post their experience of your blog
- Provide incentives
No more excuses – focus on employee engagement
For moving the needle on employee engagement, companies have to act at the employee level. Companies cannot afford to overlook a disengaged employee because it will reduce productivity and increase employee turnover-two of the most dreaded metrics for HR managers.
With engaged employees focusing on much more than their salary, you need to focus on keeping your employees engaged. Such employees are engrossed in their work, encourage trust, motivate others, and move the company forward with their hard work. We hope these ideas have helped you dig deeper into employee engagement.
While implementing these seven engagement ideas takes effort, the benefits you receive from them far outweigh the time and effort you spend to incorporate them. With proper planning, you will slowly see an increase in employee engagement rate and employee satisfaction.
Which of these seven employee engagement ideas are you using in your company? What are the results?
Do tell us in the comments section!
