4 Positive Steps to Employee Engagement
by Amanda Harper
The Challenge Of Disengagement
In a study employee benefits platform Perkbox estimated that employee disengagement costs the UK economy somewhere around £340 billion every year, as a result of employers’ costs of recruitment, lost training hours, employees’ sick days, and lower productivity. As a business can you afford the impact on your bottom line from ignoring employee engagement?
It seems clear that happy employees drive customer happiness, so how do you engage your workforce, and retain them in your business? How do you begin to fit together all the components that keep a workforce aligned, company wide. More locally, what are the components that are needed to start to create cohesion within your teams?
1. Get To Know Your People
Some will willingly offer insight into their life, others will work hard to keep things private. Whoever they are, and whatever the outcome, show interest, and be consistent. Communication is a key factor in any relationship in the workplace. Learning how to actively listen, respond appropriately and deliver on agreements will foster stronger relationships and build trust.
This understanding will also support your ability to deliver training across the board and develop your team along with your business. Different people equals different learning styles. The more in tune you are with your team the more knowledge you’ll already possess about the ways in which they take on information and how they feel most comfortable communicating.
So next time you complete a Training Needs Analysis or roll out a new training module, remember to first identify your employee’s learning profiles to ensure you are training each individual effectively and communicating in a style that fits them.
2. Create A Feeling Of Belonging
When an employee feels supported as part of a team, and as part of the wider business, feelings of job satisfaction and personal growth are experienced. The experience of achieving team goals collaboratively, whilst recognising each person’s distinctive skills within that, creates a feeling of autonomy and encourages development of better problem solving strategies.
When you’re expanding your team and lending thought to potential hierarchy, take the opportunity to think about how your company roles can integrate with and support each other. Finding ways to connect and collaborate across sub-teams will help to build strong connections all round and ensure everyone and every role supports each other.
Another positive step for bringing about that sense of unity within your team is regular team building activities outside of the day to day norms. This doesn’t have to be an all-expenses paid corporate away-weekend every quarter. A weekly catch up over Teams to open the floor to feedback and encourage general conversation amongst colleagues is a simple but effective way of bringing everyone together. Or why not vote on a charity to get behind and have fun carrying out fundraising events from time to time?
3. Make Your People Feel Valued
We’ve all heard the saying, people don’t leave organisations, people leave people. If your peers feel that their voice isn’t heard, considered or valued, the journey to being a high performance team could easily be cut short.
Why not create a web-based Employee Feedback Forum, allowing for employees to raise concerns and make suggestions to improve the working environment or processes. Employees who feel heard are much more likely to perform their best work as their empowerment will be amplified. Remember that acknowledging and acting on feedback is as important as gathering it.
Also, thinking back to that team structure, is there scope in your organisation to create mentors or ambassadors that take ownership of a particular area of your business. Perhaps the Newbie Buddy who checks in daily on your newest recruits to pick up any missed questions, provide that friendly go-to, and pass on their experiences? Or a social media guru who helps your team write their website bios and provides you with a bank of post ideas.
Responsibility provides that opportunity to acknowledge someone’s personal skill set and make them feel like an integral cog in the machine.
4. Showing Recognition And Thankfulness
It doesn’t always need to be a big grand gesture, showing appreciation in any form is a major plus. Acknowledging that an individual’s input matters results in people feeling they have meaningfully had an impact in the workplace.
From bonus schemes to one-off competitions, offering prizes and return on effort always helps not only in boosting work performance but in boosting the confidence and morale of the team as a whole. Perhaps you can introduce recurring recognition awards, such as Employee of The Quarter nominations, with certificates for all. Or a simple gesture of bringing in a cupcake platter when everyone’s knuckling down to a particularly laborious project.
One quick but ever so effective win is as easy as saying thank you. Not just “good bye, have a great weekend” as your employees depart on a Friday, but to each individual a “thank you for today, we’ve made great progress” or even “I know today was tough, but I really appreciate you for getting through it, thank you.”
So, what are your next steps to ensuring you are part of a high performing engaged team?
