Any workplace needs a good, healthy, social environment to allow employees to be productive, engaged, and to thrive. Your organization relies on retaining your employees, and in today’s age, the evolution of company culture is moving faster than ever.
Keeping up with these continuous changes and innovations is vital to allow your company to grow and compete effectively. To achieve this, management needs to recognize the needs and skills of individual employees to improve employee engagement and job performance. Here are a few ideas that you can implement to boost employee engagement in your workplace:
1. Assign Mentors for New Hires
One of the simplest ways to boost employee engagement is to focus on building strong relationships throughout the onboarding process. This ensures that employees are connected and can communicate effectively from day one. One example of how to build good working relationships early is to assign mentors to each newly hired employee. Find someone with more experience in any given area who will be able to help guide new hires to learn about their role and responsibilities, the company culture, and answer any questions or concerns they may have.
Assigning mentors to new employees also creates an environment of connectedness, communication, and community.
2. Recognize Innovation and Contributions
One of the biggest things that you can do to maintain employee engagement is to encourage it through recognizing your employees’ innovations, contributions, and suggestions, and rewarding them. Your team will be motivated to continue to engage when their company is open and accepting to new ideas and input. Recognizing innovation whenever you see it will encourage employees to think outside the box and fully engage with their jobs.
Further, recognition is a power factor in predicting employee engagement — organizations that have highly engaged employees are more likely to recognize contributions.
3. Prioritize Employee Wellness and Work-Life Balance
As we have already briefly touched on, it is important for employees to feel as though they are being appreciated, heard, and taken care of by their organization and management. This can be enforced in many ways, like emphasizing and encouraging a healthy work-life balance. It can be all too easy for people to burn out if they don’t have balance between their work and personal lives.
Tom Powell, a tech writer at Australia2write and Nextcoursework, explains: “Of course, each employee is different and their needs will vary in terms of fulfilling this goal – communicate with your team to understand what they need, such as more flexible work hours, or more distinct separation between their home life and their work.”
Another way to achieve this is to focus on employee wellness — this refers to both physical and mental wellbeing and is often overlooked when it comes to strategies for improving employee engagement. However, simply prioritizing the basic needs of each employee will improve their ability to work well and stay engaged. This means ensuring your company culture supports mental health practices.
It comes down to a very simple principle: an employee who is happy and healthy is going to be more productive and engaged in the long-run.
4. Hire Employees for the Right Roles
Your company’s talent and acquisition strategies should be directly aligned with your goals and mission. This means getting the right people on board and putting them in the right roles to actively promote employee engagement.
If you are specifically looking to prioritize high engagement and encourage your employees to do the same, this should be central in the hiring process. Look for candidates with clear and strong leadership potential by identifying when they express personal values and beliefs that align with your core values and goals. While work role compatibility is, of course, a very important identifier to look for in potential candidates for a job, finding employees who are going to fit perfectly into the culture of your organization is key.
Candidates who demonstrate high capacity for leadership are going to be better predisposed to efficiently managing a team to produce high engagement, high performance, and high-quality results. Ensure these individuals not only know and understand the core values of the company, but strive to use them to inform their work strategies and goals.
5. Reward and Recognize Achievements, Both Big and Small
The second step in this process is to reward contributions and achievements from your employees, whether they are small-scale individual successes or big-picture milestones. This works to reinforce the perception that your team is doing meaningful work and builds their motivation to continue to contribute and remain engaged. For some great ideas on how to reward your employees, take a look at our guide 33 Employee Appreciation Gifts for Any Occasion.
6. Let Employees Explore New Projects
Giving your employees the time, space, and resources to pursue projects outside of their typical day-to-day tasks can boost employee engagement considerably. Allow your employees to find innovative ways to connect them to their work not only motivates them but demonstrates that the company cares about employees and values their ideas.
This can be done in a variety of ways, whether through setting aside time in the work week for personal projects or organizing meetings to discuss these ideas with the team. Either way, by fostering innovation and creativity, employees will become more engaged in their jobs.
If employees must work on exceedingly tedious tasks, try jazzing them up. Give presentations a theme, for example, or do something as simple as asking every employee to wear their coolest hat to the next team meeting.
7. Encourage and Provide Ongoing Learning and Professional Development
It is important to remember that training should not be exclusive to new hires and the onboarding process. Not only should your company culture promote and encourage ongoing development, you should also provide opportunities for professional growth. Following talent acquisition, you should be focused on developing these talents to see improved and continued employee engagement. This means ongoing coaching and mentoring, as well as additional training and development programs to help employees improve their skills and knowledge base.
A huge part of any manager’s job is dedicated to helping your team reach their personal goals, as well as the team’s collective goals. If you are actively working to keep your employees focused on personal and professional growth, they are much more likely to be motivated to stay engaged and pursue their goals. What’s more, providing your team with the knowledge, skills, tools and resources for success will also improve the culture and working environment by encouraging and demonstrating trust and accountability.
8. Be Open to Communication and Feedback
One of the most basic human needs is the need to feel heard. Make sure your employees know you listen to their feedback and encourage them to continue to provide it. This can be facilitated by promoting a safe and productive way to receive feedback from employees and communicating how you will implement their feedback. Keep in mind that this process is only effective in improving employee engagement if you act on the feedback you receive.
In other words, ask for opinions and listen. This encourages further communication as employees can see that their opinions are valued by the company and they have the capacity to instigate real change in their working environments.
9. Embrace Transparency
It’s vital to embrace and demonstrate transparency. Throughout your employee engagement initiative, it is vital to embrace and demonstrate company transparency. Creating a transparent working environment encourages communication and builds trust among employees. This means being upfront and honest with your team about what’s working and what isn’t.
Be open about your plan’s wins and losses and take notes on how to continuously improve. Additionally, you’ll receive a lot of feedback during this process, so be transparent about what changes you will implement and which changes you will not. Bonus points if you provide the exact reasons behind not making specific changes to your employee engagement program.
10. Discuss Employee Engagement
While it may sound obvious, actually discussing employee engagement with your workforce employees can often be an overlooked step in during the process. This is also a part of being transparent — by explaining your approach to engagement and encouraging feedback and contributions from your team, you engage them in the strategy behind employee engagement. Engage your team in discussing your strategies and finding solutions.
Ready, set, engage!
Many of these principles and initiatives are fairly simple in concept but will take work to implement them effectively in practice. This comes down to actively prioritizing these ideas and using them to drive more employee engagement and higher performance quality across the board. For a more detailed, in-depth guide to improving employee engagement, check out our latest eBook: The 2020 Updated Guide to Employee Engagement.
Beatrice is a professional copywriter at Originwritings and Write my essay, specializing in a variety of topics. She is always open to sharing her personal experiences and advice with her followers at Thesis writing service and giving seasoned advice to beginner writers uncovering all the challenges and peculiarities of creating content that really sells.