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Nowadays, employee engagement matters the most for every organization as it helps employees to stay for the long run. So it is high time for you to create a better employee engagement strategy. Maintaining solutions in business for employees who are liberated will help you enhance maintenance, improve productivity, and eventually make a rise in your lowest series.
Businesses know that drawing employees and maintaining them is not enough in this present era. While encouraging and engaging them to achieve organizational goals that demand employee engagement strategies.
But from where do you get to start with it? What employee engagement strategies will you choose that can help your organization?
Employee engagement is the extent of the desire and capacity of employees to bring immense success to their organization. An engaged workforce offers efforts and high-level engagement in their work performance and is always ready to take on new challenges to build a favorable work environment.
What is Employee Engagement?
According to Gallup, in 2017, only 15% of the world’s one billion employees were committed to the job. It was shocking data. Lower engagement brings on lower productivity, and this leads to slower economic growth.
The term employee engagement is derived from human resource management. The concept revolves around the measure of an employee’s engagement towards his work more than his allotted daily routine duties or KRA. Employee engagement is an attitude of dedication of the employee in order to fulfill the organizational goals.
An engaged employee is always concerned about the difference he makes in the organization’s growth. Therefore, employee engagement as a concept is very vital for a company’s success as the concept is also associated with job satisfaction and employee morale.
It goes without saying that such engaged employees are always among high performers and productive in delivering results. Any organization can possess engaged employees with the practice of effective communication, offering rewards recognition, and working on career advancement.
Why is Employee Engagement Important?
Below are the reasons why employee engagement is important:
1. Engaged Employee Boosts Productivity
As per a statistics by Gallup poll, employees who are engaged are 21% more productive than their counterparts. Therefore, employee engagement is important for the sake of delivering productivity in achieving organizational goals.
2. Employee Engagement Enhances Customer Satisfaction
Employees who are passionate and engaged in their work are more pro to customers when it comes to having any sort of interaction with them. Their customers can actually feel their infectious vibes of engagement towards their work. Therefore, needless to say, such employees always end up solving their customers’ queries and problems ensuring customer satisfaction.
3. Employee Engagement is Important to Retain Your Best People
It is a fact that your engaged employees tend to retain in your organization whereas it is not necessary that your best employees always tend to retain. Therefore, this is to be ensured that your best employees are always engaged.
4. Employee Engagement is a Sign of Success
As quoted by Ann Latham, engagement is a symptom of success. It is not only business success but also success on a personal level as well.
How Employee Engagement is Measured?
If you ponder “how to engage employees at the workplace?”, then below are well-proven methods through which employee engagement is measured:
1. Establish Employee Engagement Goals
You can consider this as a benchmark for distinguishing an engaged employee from a non-engaged employee. Besides, this can be considered one of your engagement metrics where it can be both numeric and qualitative.
Below are some employee engagement benchmarks:
- Your employees feel that their opinions matter at work
- They see professional & career development opportunities at work
- On average your employees’ Net Promoter Score is g or above
- Low employee absenteeism
- For a certain period, there is a high level of employee engagement and employee retention.
- Your company staff regularly open an employee newsletter and show interest in the company news.
Seek help with emails – Just because emails are one of the conventional means of communication, doesn’t mean that it should be underestimated as one of the effective methods to measure employee engagement. Be it a big or small team, emails are to be considered one of the most reliable sources of collecting hard data. With nowadays advanced employee engagement tools, you can measure the given metrics of engagement through email:
2. Open Rate
This metric measures the level of curiosity your employee has when it comes to the company’s news or any latest updates. The higher the open rate of emails, the more you can assume that employee engagement in your organization is not less. Besides, you can compare past and current data for these metrics to check whether employee engagement is high currently or not.
3. Click through Rate
It is nothing but the next step of employee engagement metrics to check whether your employees are aware of the company’s latest updates and news or not. Also, you get a fair idea of which content is most relevant and tend to engage your employees the most. This also helps you figure out what sort of content to roll out in the future.
4. Location
This metric tells you from which department there are a maximum number of openings and clicks so that you get a clear idea of which teams are most engaged.
5. Pulse Survey
Pulse Survey is nothing but a more focused and short survey around a specific question. Due to its short length, employees get to engage in it more likely. Here, the key is asking simple but meaningful employee engagement questions.
Below are given three types of questions that the pulse survey is zeroing in on:
- Satisfaction questions – Do you get enough inspiration from your team to do your best work?
- Opportunity questions – Do you find enough opportunities for growth in your current team?
- Alignment questions – Does your leadership team consider your perspective in major decisions
6. Calculation of eNPS
Unlike qualitative employee metrics, a more numeric, precise engagement score is better to analyze employee engagement. eNPS is nothing but the difference between your most engaged and least engaged employee.To put it in nutshell, it means how likely is your employee to brag about his organization to others.
7. Setting up one-on-one Virtual Meetings
Conducting one-on-one meetings is one of the best ways to seek employee feedback and analyze their engagement level instead of non-verbal cues. Besides, while conducting such a session, ensure that you are devoid of any sort of distractions around and give your all ears to the conversation. One-on-ones prove to be one of the qualitative methods to seek employee feedback. Below are some questions that fit well to ask in such a session:
- What’s one thing about your work experience that you find positive?
- Name one thing about your work experience in which you would want improvement.
- Describe your organization’s culture in 3 words or phrases.
8. Form a Focus Group
Though this method is widely used in market research but is suitable to analyze employee engagement for large organizations where one-on-one discussions are hard to conduct. This method is implemented by creating a callout for participants using an internal newsletter. Choose employees from the concerned department and guide a discussion among them with the following set of questions:
- Do you find any causes or reasons that limit your growth in the organization?
- Can you agree with your company’s definition of success?
- Do you have a good awareness of your role in contributing to organizational goals?
9. Check Employee Retention
The graph of employee retention goes up with an increase in employee engagement level for an organization. Besides, such employees are less likely to opt for alternative options in terms of switching jobs. Employee retention can be measured by comparing employee turnover for the current year or quarter with that of the previous year or quarter.
In case you find the employee turnover rate higher, ask yourself what steps you took to make a difference. Additionally, you can also conduct a pulse survey in order to check employee retention thought processes in your employees’ minds.
Below mentioned Yes/No questions throw light as to how to conduct a such survey:
- Do you feel proud to work for the company [X]?
- Do you see yourself working for company [X] in 2 years’ time?
10. Check your Employee’s Productivity
It goes without saying that engaged employees bring productivity in their work and therefore productivity becomes one of the factors to measure employee engagement. It is possible to measure an employee’s productivity by dividing revenue for a specific year or quarter by total number of employees
11. Keep a check on Your Employee Absenteeism Rate
It’s a red flag if you find your employees taking frequent leaves. In order to take a closer look at the trend, you should observe the rate and amount of absent employees over a given period. Needless to say that high employee absenteeism suggests high employee disengagement.
12. Use an Exit Survey
This survey is all about collecting engagement data of employees who are already leaving the company. Such sort of survey definitely comes up with honest reviews and feedback about employee engagement as employees are already leaving and have no fear of management and other factors playing any other role.
What is an Employee Engagement Strategy?
Maintaining employee engagement is not an easy task as it needs proper strategy and planning. Studies of Zenefits showed that 63.3% of the companies have encountered that maintaining employees is more difficult than recruiting them. As this approach needs proper management and maintenance is a little bit difficult for the company on a big scale. Therefore, Employee engagement strategies will help your organization in every way. It will provide you with a planned segment for how your organization can keep your employees committed and engaged.
But before that, you should plan an overview for your strategy, like how you are going to measure engagement, your objectives, productivity, budget, and precise tactics for how you’ll enhance engagement. With this kind of strategy, you can definitely improve employee engagement in your organization and fulfill all your desired goals.
Useful Employee Engagement Strategies
Here are some of the useful employee engagement strategies that you can apply to your organization for better management:
→ Start a Survey Campaign
The most important step in improving employee engagement is understanding where it stands now. Conducting a survey can give you insight into what motivates employees and how they feel about their jobs, their managers and other aspects of their workplace. It will also help you identify any gaps in your company’s programs that might be preventing employees from being engaged or feeling like they have a say in decisions made by management.
→ Focus on your Employees
An employee engagement survey can help your employees stay engaged within the organization. Discuss all the issues and experiences and plan employee engagement strategies to resolve them accordingly. Employee engagement surveys questions are very important as they help you understand the feelings and acquaintances of your employees and complete working staff.
→ Act on the Obtained Data
As an organization, if you fail to know what are the concerns and challenges your employees are facing, then there is some serious issue. Execution of new things can help your employees perform better in many aspects. Therefore, when you receive any data that leads to disengagement among employees, you should take a measure against it and try to build employee engagement for better outcomes. Provide your employees the opportunity to make extra efforts with dedication and comfort to fulfill your organizational goals.
→ Setup Committee to Engage Employees
Form an employee engagement committee. Once you know what’s working and what isn’t, it’s time to turn your attention toward specific solutions that will make an impact on your workforce as well as on your bottom line. A good place to start is by forming an employee engagement committee made up of managers who are committed to making improvements in their departments’ operations and culture. This group should include both employees who work directly for the management team (such as hourly workers) and those who work for the company as a whole (such as executives).
→ Provide Authority to Employees to Speak
In an organization, not every employee likes or feels comfortable speaking in front of everyone, whether it will be a survey or anything. Implementing different communication channels can help them open up and help them know that their opinions do matter to the organization, whether it will be open communication or via an application in writing.
→ Try open Door Approach
Many organizations are now turning to the free and liberated culture. Try to have an open-door approach, as it will help build transparency and let employees put all their concerns and issues in front of the management without any tension. Also, it will allow employees to provide feedback and motivate them to put their thoughts willingly.
→ Keep Engaged Remote or In house Teams
One way is to use technology like video conferencing and video-enabled applications (i.e., Skype, Zoom, etc.). This allows you to connect with your employees in real time and talk about work issues or even conduct training sessions. Another way is to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for team updates and conversations about the company’s mission, vision, values and goals.
Advantages of a Highly Engaged Workforce
The Gallup Study of 2008 showed that employees who are engaged with their organization perform better and provide better results. Whereas employees who are disengaged feel their efforts do not matter to the organization as they get demotivated quickly and create a negative effect on their performance and overall results. Therefore, an engaged workforce builds a dynamic relationship with the association that enables them:
- Perform better to accomplish successful business agendas
- Experiment and create innovations in the workplace
- Draw customers and employees
- Work with dedication toward the company, its development, and its operations
- Invest power and positivity in the workplace.
Conclusion
These above-mentioned employee engagement strategies provide you with the positive results of higher employee engagement in the organization. Implementing employee engagement best practices leads to influential growth in employee talent, skill, and productivity. Low employee engagement is the most problematic issue in today’s world. In every organization 10 of 7 employees are disengaged, and this eventually affects the overall growth and development of the complete workforce.
Employee engagement strategies are now very important for every size of organization. As it encourages a positive and enthusiastic work environment and boosts the morals of every staff member. However, in this competitive market, the organizations that follow the ideas for employee engagement strategies beat their challengers in terms of profitability and productivity.
