Employee engagement – how can we do more?

A popular topic for discussion in 2020, Employee Engagement and happiness in the workplace is finally being taken seriously in SMEs and large corporates at global level. Many new roles have opened up including Chief Happiness Officers and Employee Experience Managers, showing commitment and recognition to the importance of keeping your team feeling happy, positive and energised. 

Creating an environment where I would want to be employed myself was one of my core purposes for starting and growing a business. Over the years before founding KVA, I had worked in many agencies that didn’t value their team and you could see the effect this had on client work and relationships. People want to do business with people and working with inspiring and productive teams allows clients / customers to feel important, valued and excited, achieving the best results. 

Here I’ve shared some examples of how you can achieve this and integrate a kindness culture, empowering your team, leading to maximum engagement and productivity.

Leadership

Leading by example is THE most important factor. The collective efforts of individuals won’t impact if leadership doesn't have a positive and change mindset, making it difficult to move forward. Luckily most companies recognise this and are looking for inspirational leaders that empower, support, motivate and reward. One area that still needs work is an illusion in society that kindness means weakness and that business leaders need to be ruthless and aggressive. Integration of kindness culture is not a weakness, it’s a strength. You’re growing a team or a business leading by example, changing daily lives and making people feel good.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. 

Culture

Take proactive steps to clearly define your culture for employees, allowing them to show support and create your own brand ambassadors. Allowing team members to come up with ideas to contribute to this will reflect an inclusive value set whereby everyone has a voice and has a chance to actively contribute towards making your culture rewarding for everyone.

Empowerment

You employ people for a reason. All of us need to feel a sense of achievement in our daily lives and giving your team the freedom to take individual responsibility doesn’t take away from your overall accountability. However it will allow everyone to reach their full potential and shine. Yes, you probably could do something better yourself but when you involve others, you’ll get different perspectives which helps you stay ahead of the curve. At KVA, we have regular team sessions, which aim to support personal development and further our knowledge. It’s important everyone has clear individual goals for progression and by giving opportunities for everyone to bond as a team outside of the office, we’re building a strong, happier working environment where everyone is learning new skills. 

Purpose

Just like your mission statement for a business, any efforts in employee engagement need to be underpinned by a purpose… a why. This works best when it’s genuine and adopted across the board, allowing leadership to filter this down internally. My purpose with KVA is to make people happy, excited and fulfilled. This goes for the team internally but also for every client we partner with. It underpins every decision from which clients we partner with, down to our recruitment strategy.

Integration of kindness culture is not a weakness, it’s a strength. You’re growing a team leading by example, changing daily lives and making people feel good.

Messaging

How you communicate to your team internally is vital to the success of your employee engagement programme. An important factor to consider is how you want your employees to feel; not just on a typical working day but when talking about your brand outside of the workplace. How can you give them the best experience out of their employment? Weaving your culture values into your messaging bible will also assist your onboarding process with new employees.

Inspire

Great leadership never dictates – it motivates and inspires. When a team feel inspired, it’s amazing at the ideas that flow! Essential in today’s digital world, it’s the fastest route to innovation, encouraging new ideas to pro actively shift according to market conditions. I actually got this tattooed on my foot last year as a reminder of my mission! At KVA, we inspire by being positive and forward thinking to deliver our mission of keeping our clients ahead of the curve.

Feedback

Asking how your team feel and how supported they are at work will give you a good baseline to establish improvements. At KVA, we measure culture engagement regularly through 1-2-1 meetings with mentors. Quotes we have received as a result of this feedback include ‘This is the best place I have ever worked – my family think I’m a different person’, ‘I have never felt tempted to have a sick day!’ and ‘The only way I would leave KVA is in a coffin!’ When you truly care about the welfare of your employees, you look for opportunities for continuous improvement in order to create the best environment.

Measurement

It’s important to regularly measure employee satisfaction to ensure you have a benchmark. A recent initiative at KVA was sending round a poll allowing the team to anonymously vote on what motivates them on a day-to-day basis. This included things such a great salary, good communication with leadership, flexible working hours, internal culture etc. We found that salary was lower down the chain and that the majority of the team value their relationship with colleagues and being in a positive working environment above all else. The aim was to identify each individual’s priority of factors that contribute to their happiness in the workplace.

Reward

I’m a strong believer that a company is only as good as its team. If your team has gone above and beyond and you’ve celebrated financial success, there’s nothing more rewarding than being able to give back to your team. After a particularly tough year of working hard and #TeamKVA sacrificing a lot of their personal time for the company and our clients, I decided to take everyone on holiday to St Lucia to say thank you. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/truly-investing-people-why-ive-chosen-take-my-whole-kelly-allison/

It’s a fact that engaged employees lead to greater productivity and a happy team. With an average of only 30% of employees feeling engaged at work, it’s clear the impact we can make. A rise in this figure will directly correlate with a reduction of recruitment costs and employee turnover and significantly increase quality of output. With engagement at an all time low, it’s a great time to make small steps toward big change.   

Want to hear more? Kelly will be speaking at the Employee Engagement awards at The Oval, London on 1st April 2020. Link here to book your tickets: https://www.ee-awards.com/events/the-2020-uk-europe-employee-engagement-conference/

KVA’s podcast is coming soon! If you’d like to feature in our Kindness Culture episode, we would love to hear your stories. Feel free to email them through to [email protected] and we'll be in touch :-)

www.kvadigital.co.uk