Five Employee Engagement Strategies
In a previous post, we went over strategic ways to retain your employees. This week, we will discover employee engagement strategies.
Employee engagement is extremely important when building and maintaining your company’s growth. It is the heart of human resources (HR) services. Employee engagement focuses on the emotional health and well-being of your employees. How do your employees feel when they come to work? Are they happy? Do they feel enthusiastic when they walk through the door? How do they feel about the work they are fulfilling? Do they enjoy it or do they find it boring? Do your employees feel like they can grow professionally? These questions are essential to explore when it comes to employee engagement.
Why Employee Engagement is Important
As we talked about last week, happy employees equal happy customers and great service. Here are a few more reasons why employee engagement is significant.
Engaged employees are more likely to be…
- a higher performer/productive
- loyal to your company,
- more engaged,
- motivated to reach or surpass your company’s expectations,
- concerned with your company’s success, and
- committed to your company’s values and goals.
As you can see, the happiness of your employees is crucial to the success of your company. There is nothing like having a fulfilling job and being able to do what you love for employment. These are the types of employees you want to work for you, so investing in employee engagement is necessary. Let us go over some ways you can invest. Here are our top five strategic ways to fulfill employee engagement.
Give Your Employees a Voice
It is one of the easiest, yet most missed steps employers do not do or do not do well. Giving your employees a voice to express their thoughts and concerns is a vital tool for employee engagement. BUT even more importantly, is acting on the feedback. So many companies who do surveys lack follow-through. Employees want to be heard…which means that they need more than a place to share their thoughts…they need to see companies actually acknowledge and take action on those thoughts.
Get support through our Talent Optimization process, which will help you identify what’s working or not, give you control over your engagement, and arm your people managers with the confidence they need to discuss the results of the survey with their teams and take action.
And through engagement surveys and discussions, you can learn what other areas you and your company should be focusing on to support your employees. Areas like wellness, what employees love to do, showing your employees how they are important to you and your organization, and celebrating your employees…as discussed below.
Invest in Their Wellness
Emotional wellness is important, but the mental and physical well-being of your employees is important as well.
Show your employees that you are invested in their well-being by providing programs that will support their health. Another fun idea is to have a cooking event. Perhaps you can take half of a workday to have a chef teach your employees how to cook a quick and healthy meal (this can be done both in-person and virtually with the proper planning). And if possible, at the end of the session, employees can eat and share their meals.
Another way you can invest in their wellness is to provide discounted gym memberships. You can also provide memberships to healthy food delivery services such as Freshly, Hello Fresh, and Home Chef. Please note that these are just examples. Please do your due diligence to find healthy meal plans that correspond with your company’s values.
Additional ways you can invest in their wellness include providing mental health support through apps like Calm (mediation), TalkSpace (therapy), Sanvello (stress relief), CBT Guide to Depression for Self-help (depression support), Mood Mission (learning coping skills), LifeGuides (external peer coaching and support) or Moodfit (an overall mental health app). There are so many options, so please do your due diligence to find the right tool or set of tools to provide to your employees based on their needs.
Focus on What Your Employees Love
Another great way to invest in employee engagement is to learn what your employees love. What drives them and what their talents are is indispensable. But to find this out, you will have to learn about them. You can do this through one on one’s, company surveys, and strength tests.
Once you discover what your employees love and what they are good at, you can give them more tasks that align with who they are. Of course, they still may have to do some tasks they do not favor, but it is all about balance. Balance the tasks they love with the tasks that need to be fulfilled regardless.
Show Your Employees How Important They Are
Sometimes we may go to work and not understand how significant our roles are to the company’s vision. Show your employees how essential their roles are to the vision and growth of your company. You can do this by connecting the employees’ goals to the company KPIs. There are lots of great performance management tools available that will provide easy software capabilities for you, your managers, and your employees to stay connected on what is important to the overall health of the organization.
It is important to help employees understand their role by connecting their own tasks/goals to the company’s overall KPIs and Objectives. The more your employees understand the importance of their role, the more likely they are to take it seriously and recognize how essential they are.
Celebrate Personal Events With Your Employees
Let your employees know that it is not always about work, but that you are there to celebrate their personal growth and wins.
Perhaps your employee is in school. You can celebrate their graduation with them. Maybe you have an employee who is having a baby. Throwing them a small baby shower will make them feel loved. Celebrating birthdays is also a fun way to boost employee engagement. You can add your employees’ birthdays to the calendar, and perhaps at the end of the month, celebrate everyone who has a birthday during that corresponding month. And some HCM/HRIS tools automatically highlight your employees’ birthdays. Just make sure your employees are OK with doing so.
Take the time to get to know your employees on a personal level and celebrate the things they achieve outside of work. You can also support them during times they do not feel like they have won. Perhaps they have been diagnosed with cancer or someone has passed in their family. The more supportive you are of your employees’ personal life, the more they are likely to feel cared for. Just make sure your employees are OK with being recognized and receiving support (publically or not). Some employees may not wish to celebrate or be recognized/highlighted. Making sure you get to know your employees’ preferences are just as important as getting to know what is going on in their lives.
Need More Help?
Employee engagement is so important to us because the well-being of our people matters. We know how hard it can be to create a work environment that thrives off of employee engagement, so please reach out to us if you need help strategizing ways to increase the success of employee engagement within your company.