Are you feeling like your company’s morale is low? Are you having a hard time reaching out to employees? Do you feel like there is a lack of excitement around current and future initiatives?
If all (or some!) of the above ring true with your company, then you may need to manage the workforce carefully in order to engage your employees. In this technological age where employees can come and go, work remotely, or outsource a range of projects, it is important to invest time to retain your staff and keep them focused on the purpose of your organization.
In order to keep your staff engaged, we’ve done research on the five best employee engagement strategies:
1. Make Sure Your Employee Focus is “Bottom Up”
Your employee engagement strategies should adopt a bottom up approach, which means that you focus on the people at the core of your business. After all, your business will not function without your staff, so it’s important to get into the mindset of your employees.
As a starting point to gauge people’s opinions and concerns, consider developing an anonymous web-based survey for staff. When phrasing the questions, you need to ensure that they are as open as possible. The worst thing is to develop a survey and phrase the questions in a way that leads staff to respond in a certain way.
A true survey needs to capture the real opinions of your staff. Therefore, it is worthwhile to leave survey questions as open-ended as possible in order to get people’s actual feedback. Indeed, the more that you ask your team for their true opinions, they more empowered and valued they feel. In turn, they will funnel that positivity and energy back into their work.
2. Make it Clear that You are Here to Listen
The issue with many companies is that those in leadership roles often do not take time to listen to employee concerns. However, if an issue has been brought up, then it must be addressed. Most importantly, it needs to be addressed in front of whoever had raised it, and not behind closed doors. You need to show staff that you are dealing with it.
It is also important to echo back what you have heard. When concerns are brought forward, it is vital that you echo back what you heard and provide your take on it. Your staff need to hear from you, and see where you stand when it comes to the issue.
3. Share Great Ideas Across Teams
When it comes to building up effective employee engagement strategies across the organization, it is important to share positive experiences and feedback amongst internal and external teams. There is nothing more empowering than feeling like your ideas are being absorbed and appreciated by another team. As such, you should make an effort to highlight your employees’ achievements.
One idea is to create an internal “kudos” process where you praise the efforts of your staff. Another great idea is to establish an internal symposium where great ideas, projects and future brainstorming is shared. This can take the form of a conference, which consists of presentations, “lunch and learns” and networking.
4. Take Everyone’s Style and Preferences into Account
In a work environment, you have to understand that everyone is built differently. Indeed, it is these differences that are challenging, but also extremely rewarding, both at the same time. In order to understand how everyone can achieve the company’s goals, it is important to understand everyone’s working styles.
One of the best employee engagement strategies is to run a workshop which analyzes the leadership styles of your staff. Furthermore, you can also run various exercises to see how the team can work well together, and how everyone’s personalities mesh together. Indeed, once you understand how everyone’s style works together, it will be easier to figure how best to move forward around different projects and upcoming priorities.
5. Establish Work-Life Balance
Work shouldn’t only be about work. Although you come to work to get a job done and to achieve results, it’s important to take a step back and have fun and connect with your peers. Therefore, fun team building activities and social events are absolutely key in reinforcing employee engagement within your organization.
Great ideas for group activities are trivia nights, team sports, and holiday-themed contests such as gingerbread building competitions, as well as Halloween costume contests. The best part is that these activities don’t need to take too long and can be done over lunch time. Now I call that a win-win!
Effective employee engagement does not happen overnight. Instead, it takes some careful planning and patience. In order to make your employees feel comfortable, you need to take time to actually understand the issue. Patience and planning goes a long way in building up employee engagement.
