How to maximise employee engagement within the workplace

Ensuring that your employees are motivated, happy and willing to produce the best outcome for your business ultimately depends on how engaged and fulfilled they are with their work. This?Business Kitz?blog post will discuss how to maximise employee engagement within the workplace.

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is the emotional attachment and level of enthusiasm employees have with their organisation. As a result, this represents how motivated employees are to work hard for their company and commit to the vision and growth of the organisation.?

Why is employee engagement important?

Employee engagement is the backbone of any organisation, and with the sufficient protocols in place it can dramatically improve work culture, employee productivity, reduce staff turnover, increase customer satisfaction, increase profits, and a offer higher return to stakeholders. Without employee engagement strategies, many employees lose sight of the organisation’s vision and how their work contributes to the overall success of the company. As a result, this leads to decreased motivation, satisfaction and overall happiness within the company.?

How to measure employee engagement

To improve employee engagement it is important to conduct an audit of current strategies, to understand what your organisation is doing well and what your key areas of improvement are. To implement this, creating a measurement strategy will be useful to evaluate current employee engagement. This strategy can include a range of measurable metrics, that will evaluate each key area of discussion and provide valuable insight.

By creating a survey and having open conversations with employees, both managers and employees can offer perspective on current business operations and how it can be improved. Business should create questions based on workplace culture, relationships and productivity to determine how employees currently feel about the status of the company’s work environment. Company’s should be willing to take on board any feedback, and collate this to analyse the key areas of improvement.?

How to improve employee engagement

After conducting an initial audit into current employee engagement results, you will be able to create new strategies to improve employee engagement and effectively regulate it in the future. The key to success is to ensure employees are always a priority within the business, and that you are constantly communicating and sharing the passions and visions of the business to fuel their purpose of working for you.?

The following are some strategies you can implement to ensure employee engagement is sufficiently encouraged within a company:

1. Regular feedback and open communication channels?such as?performance reviews, will allow employees and management to create a more open relationship, where feedback and constructive criticism are given in a succinct and positive manner. This will allow both parties to continuously grow in a nurturing environment.?
2. Continuous recognition?is a simple way to make an employee feel valued and a part of something bigger than themselves. As a result, this further motivates employees to continue working towards the collective organisational goal and continuously improve to achieve more recognition. This builds a sense of security and trust within the organisation, which will reduce staff turnover.
3. Establishing a collaborative environment?is critical for employee engagement, as it encourages employees to share ideas and build relationships with their peers. This community aspect will increase energy, productivity and happiness within employees and will encourage innovative and peer-reviewed new ideas.?This?Forbes?article goes in to more depth on how effective collaboration can be in a working environment.
4. Creating a welcoming onboarding experience?will allow employees to feel valued and familiar with the company’s vision from their first day. By showcasing to the employee their value towards the company at the very beginning, this will allow them to feel comfortable in being able to grow with the company, with aligned values. Familiarising new recruits with the company’s vision also gives you the opportunity to filter out any new recruits who may not align with the organisations values, which will lead to higher engagement. Creating an effective onboarding strategy requires various in-depth documentations covering all aspects of the organisation. Business Kitz offers a?range of templates?that will guide you in ensuring every aspect of recruitment is covered.?
5. Offering continuous training opportunities?is an innovative and engaging way to increase employee engagement. According to research conducted by the?Society for Human Resource Management, 76% of employees are more likely to stay with a company that offers continuous training opportunities. This is because employees feel they are gaining additional value within their professional development, and can be considered an added bonus to their traditional salary, which can give advantage over other job offers.
6. Incentivising the job?can be completed through introducing systems such as employee benefits, bonuses, promotional opportunities and more. This technique allows the employee to feel like they are working towards something, giving them a target to achieve, rather than passive and mindless work. This will increase productivity and quality of work as well as employee morale, as employees are encouraged to work to their highest proficiency.?
7. Prioritising wellbeing?is a technique to show employees that the company cares for them both personally and professionally. This can be done by promoting work-life balance, offering mental health breaks and encouraging physical activity, as well as creating a transparent and open communication forum so employees are able to communicate any issues or guidance they assistance with. This strategy will help to reduce stress and improve the mental stamina of employees, ultimately improving productivity, as the employees are more motivated and equipped to work for a company who values them, not just as an asset, but as a person.?

Legal advice

If you are an employee who feels dissatisfied within your role, and are seeking legal guidance to determine if leaving your job is an option due to legally obliging commitments, please do not hesitate to contact our sister company, Legal Kitz by phone on 1300 988 954 or email to [email protected]. We offer a?FREE 30-minute consultation?for all your legal needs.?Click here?to book now.