What do you mean by Engagement? Is it just a connection or there is more to it?
It is correctly quoted by Simon Sinek, “When people are financially invested, they want a return. When they are emotionally invested, they want to contribute”
Employee Engagement is the level of mental cum emotional connection and positivity an employee feels towards the work he does, his colleagues and his organization which results into positive attitude and better work behavior. As per statistics, engaged employees have as much as 70% higher productivity than the disengaged ones. When as an organization you build a team, you would always want to have employees which feel at home whenever at work so that the contribution levels are as high as possible leading to higher returns for the company as well as for the individual.
To be more precise, employee engagement is a modern day workplace approach wherein the correct conditions exist for team members so that they can offer their best every day and they stay motivated and fully committed to the company’s vision with a sense of belonging.
Few effective strategies for keeping employees engaged are as follows:
1. Empowering the team to discover their true potential
What’s better than a team full of highly productive employees who can work as per the plan. But prior to this, you as a manager need to identify the gaps, rectify the shortcomings, push boundaries for the team. The performers can be identified first followed by the potentially capable and the under-performers.
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The reasons for lower employee productivity should be thought of and valid training plans should be made for the needy. Each and every employee should have enough opportunities to come forward and prove their mettle. Skills, interest and performance should go hand in hand and if the organization provides such opportunities then the employees are sure to be engaged.
2. Constant Appreciation at individual and team’s level
As a company if you need your employees to be connected, its your responsibility too to appreciate and reward good performances. Performance linked rewards should be a part of the salary and payroll management strategy. Appreciation must not only be limited to individuals but should be spread across teams, departments, locations and offices. Public recognition is what everyone craves for and you need to offer the same to your employees
3. Honest and Transparent communication at workplace
An unbiased workplace is the dream of every aspiring professional. The responsibilities must be conveyed properly in a transparent manner with everyone from time to time and the communication should never be one way. It should be open ended with scope for discussion at all levels. Even if you are tracking your employees via an employee monitoring software, employee monitoring system or a time tracking tool you need to inform them about this in advance so that no questions can be asked in the future and the team accepts the practice with open hands. There must be no nepotism or preference at workplace whatsoever
4. Offer smooth on-boarding to new employees & smooth exits to the old
While hiring new employees the joining formalities must be simplified. A quick and smooth on-boarding can create an everlasting impression within the minds of the employees and they would feel motivated towards work. In case any of your older employees wants an exit or leaves the organization, the exit process must be seamless as well and his/her contributions must be duely recognized.
This also calls for an efficient leave and attendance management system to be integrated with the hiring and exit processes.
5. Assist the team to learn more & develop careers
For employee engagement you need to have a proper learning and development system at place. Employee training and mentoring is very necessary for professional growth. If you can assist an individual in his/her learning journey, the returns are 10X with the employee also contributing back to your company. The more the learning, higher will be the employee productivity
6. Consistent Monetary Growth
Lastly, nothing comes for free in this world. As such the salary growth for an employee must be commensurate too with his performance. As talked earlier, an efficient payroll management and workforce analytics system must be in place to chalk out the perfect salary appraisal plan for your team. If you don’t offer them as per market standards, others will and the engagement levels will go down drastically.
The journey from a highly engaged employee to a disengaged employee is helped by the company and its management itself. Adequate care must be exercised while adopting best practices at work so that results are as desired.
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We360.ai has helped 100’s of organizations in improving the employee productivity and employee engagement levels and this has led us to share few best practices in this blog. Hope they help you out in Hope they help you out in our journey.
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