Employee engagement has been a critical part of businesses' employee-facing efforts for years. After all, statistics gathered by Dynamic Signal show that efforts aimed at improving worker involvement with their jobs can considerably pay off:
- Engaged employees are as much as 25 percent more productive.
- Businesses with engaged employees also see more than 2 times higher average 3-year revenue growth over companies with only marginally involved workers.
- Boosting employee engagement can result in a 10 percent rise in profits, as well as 18 percent higher customer retention rates.
For all these reasons and more, employee engagement will continue to be a top priority in 2018. However, it's important that organizational human resource teams and their stakeholders are leveraging the best efforts and practices to pinpoint this critical element and work to improve it. Let's examine some of the valuable strategies to incorporate into internal employee engagement efforts:
Gauge the current state of engagement: Employee survey
Before you can kick off any initiative related to improving worker involvement, it's imperative that decision-makers have the best idea about where they currently stand. Creating, circulating and studying the results of an employee survey is a powerful first step here.
According to an HR Bartender guest post from Readex Research, there are a few important considerations to make with the survey, including:
- Asking employees about their working relationships and the overall company culture.
- Requesting opinions and feelings about current compensation and benefits offered at the business.
- Including survey questions related to at-work communication, particularly that which occurs between employees and their management.
- Requesting reactions pertaining to the overall employee experience.
Providing a place for workers to freely offer up their thoughts in addition to multiple choice or yes/no questions can also be helpful. For the most honest responses, the survey should be unbiased and have a clear purpose, and employees should be able to provide answers anonymously.
Get a sense of the current employee experience before making any changes to company culture. Communicating and leveraging results
As Readex Research noted in a separate post, it's critical that HR teams and stakeholders utilize the survey, and not just sit on the results. These insights should be put to work internally to enhance the employee experience and business culture, which can contribute to improved employee engagement.
"I've always said that the absolute worst thing companies can do is ask employees for their thoughts and then do nothing with the information," Readex Research noted. "The whole purpose of a survey is to take action."
In this way, the HR department and executive team should review the results of the survey, seeking out actionable insights – details that can be used to shift or adjust processes or policies – specifically. Once these insights have been teased out, it's imperative that business leaders communicate these results to their workforce, and enable employees to ask questions about the information.
Finally, it's critical that survey results be put to good use. Some suggestions may be able to be incorporated quickly; others may take time and policy changes. In either case, executives should work to confirm company changes where possible, as well as potential timelines.
"If employees feel their feedback was openly accepted, carefully considered and acted upon, they will continue to offer feedback," Readex Research stated.
One-on-one communication
One of the best ways to prevent employees from feeling like they're just another face in the crowd is to ensure that workers and their managers – as well as HR department representatives and executives – have guaranteed face time. As HR consultant and industry expert Sharlyn Lauby noted, in-person, one-on-one meetings haven't been taking place as often as they did in the past.
"Regular communication and a targeted focus on individual employees can go a long way."
However, regular communication and a targeted focus on individual employees can go a long way.
"[M]anagers and employees need to have regular conversations," Lauby wrote. "And the conversations need to be good. The result will be trusting relationships, employee engagement, and retention."
Consider rewards
Finally, it can also be worthwhile to consider recognition, rewards and other perks to spur and support continuing employee engagement. This could be as simple and offering free lunch to employees who reach or surpass a certain workload level, or as elaborate as conducting a company award ceremony where workers are recognized based on their more individual merits.
"A strong reward and recognition program requires a certain level of mindfulness and a dedicated effort to showing your employees that you notice and appreciate everything they bring to the team," Jostle contributor Hannah Price wrote.
Whatever route enterprises choose to take, adding a reward element could be just the thing to reduce turnover and help boost engagement.
To find out more about the advantages that having an engaged workforce can bring – as well as how to get your company there – connect with the experts at Triton Benefits and HR Solutions today.