When we say "employee engagement," we mean how a worker is committed and feels a kinship within the company where they spend most of their week. High employee engagement is often critical in today's highly competitive market and ensuring your business remains successful.
When your employees are engaged, they will work hard for your company's common goal and not just be there for the cheque. This is why we must remain vigilant. Especially true today as a recent Gallup poll reported that the second half of 2021 saw a slight drop from 36% to 34% of engaged workers, which coincides with worker productivity closely.
So let's explore some strategies to keep our employee engagement high.
1. Build up Trust
When you build up trust with your employees, you will ensure that your company starts on a firm foundation. When your employees feel like they can trust you, they give honest feedback. S
o often, employees feel intimidated by their management, and they feel like they can't trust it. As soon as we change this, we can have a more healthy environment for work.
2. Set up Clear Goals with good communication
Often an employee will feel awkward communicating with their manager or colleagues if onboarding is done in a shabby way. And the best way to do that is to set a clear goal in mind.
What your company does, why it does it, and what part they play in the grand scheme of things. When workers have no idea what their role in the machine is or what it does, they tend to lose interest and motivation.
3. Don't Micromanage
The best way to empower your employees is when you don't micromanage them. When you show them that they trust you, they will feel a sense of obligation and satisfaction with their work. When your employees have the power to do actual meaningful work without someone constantly breathing on their neck, that's when the magic happens.
4. Recognize Employee's Accomplishments
We wrote a whole article about this, but the short of it is that when you recognize employees' accomplishments, you promote a healthy work environment.
The best companies to work for are the ones that offer rewards and training programs for their employees. This is a powerful way of having high retention rates and a better-skilled workforce.
5. Introduce Everyone to Everybody
Now we know that when a company becomes too big, it is not easy to introduce everyone to everybody else, but it is essential that you at least try.
With remote work becoming the norm, some employees will never meet anyone other than their nearest colleagues or managers. So when you introduce your new hires to as many of your employees as possible, you never know when synergy might happen.
6. Have Your Employees Work On Engagement
When you make your workers a part of the engagement strategies you come up with, you have the best people handling employee satisfaction. Who better to help than the people who are right there in the trenches. They know best what works and what does not.
Ask for volunteers first because it is always best to start with highly motivated people first. If you don't have many volunteers, try to target and incentivize some of your most hardworking and popular employees.
7. Create a Safe Work Environment
A simple way to create a safe work environment is to have zero tolerance for toxic behavior. Every company is judged by the amount of horrible behavior it is willing to tolerate from poisonous people. It doesn't matter if they are upper, middle, or lower management; a rotten apple does spoil the barrel. You have to allow your employees a way to provide feedback to HR or even the company's CEO in a safe manner.
8. Have Transparency
If your company is transparent in what they do, how much it earns, and how much and who it rewards, it will inspire its workforce to keep being motivated. Keep your employees updated through regular newsletters, webinars, or email chains. When your company is transparent, it will keep everyone on the same page and improve inter-departmental communication. This will significantly impact your company's culture and work wonders for its reputation.
Conclusion
If you want to keep your employees engaged, you have to be honest. It would help if you told them exactly what you expect them to do. Don't expect too much in the beginning. Please don't give them unrealistic goals; this will affect what you are trying to accomplish in the wrong way.
However, if you do this right, you will foster creativity, collaboration, and an absolute dedication to your shared goals. The more dedicated employees you have, the closer your company will be to fulfilling its mission and success.