Employee engagement is the degree to which employees are motivated, passionate and invested in their work. Engagement also shows the individual’s commitment to the company and their emotional connection to the people they work with.
High employee engagement is often the key to a company’s productivity. Employees who feel neglected lose the will to complete tasks and achieve goals. Successful companies support their employees with many benefits and activities ranging from company outings to flexible work situations.
Many factors influence employee engagement, including individual characteristics, the notion about the company, life experiences, aspirations from the job, and job involvement and satisfaction scores.
These factors can fluctuate over time, so measuring employee engagement is key to staying on top of your employees’ needs. So consider the strategies below to amplify your employee engagement scores next year without fail.
7 Employee Engagement Strategies To Implement & Watch Out For Next Year
Identify achievable but challenging goals for your employees
Employees are more engaged when there is a goal they can achieve with equal challenging spirit and zeal. For that to happen, you must identify the goals clearly along with the company’s core values and then educate each employee about these values. This ensures that employees understand the importance of the company’s values, their positive impact on the company and what is expected of each individual.
Lead by example and hold each member of your team accountable. Failure to do so fosters a culture of mistrust that disconnects employees.
Prioritise feedback
Employees rate feedback as one of the most important skills a leader can have, second only to communication. Employees crave feedback, and this influences their engagement. So, managers must have regular meetings with each employee. It helps them identify ongoing concerns before things become uncontrollable.
While it can be tempting to implement a company-wide feedback program, acknowledge that every team operates with different mindsets and values.
Managers should talk directly to their team members about their preferred methods of getting feedback. This process will help employees engage in a way that makes sense to them.
uKnowva HRMS is an enterprising platform where companies can integrate their chat messengers. They can leverage its social intranet for ongoing corporate communication. This strategy will boost and foster direct feedback. It will happen without roadblocks, and employees will know what impression they create over others within a single click.
This instant feedback from reporting managers or even C-suite level executives is necessary for employees to engage effectively.
Initiate volunteering opportunities
Employees want to know that they work for a company that wants to contribute positively to society. Volunteering unites employees with a higher purpose and provides the opportunity to connect on a deeper level. 70% of employees, according to an internet study, believe volunteering events improve morale, and 89% believe companies that sponsor charitable activities have a better work environment.
Look for volunteer opportunities near your office and plan an after-work event. This is an easy way to bring teams together and give back to your community. Also, offer a “Volunteer Day” as an employee perk. This should be a day outside your PTO policy where employees can take time off to give their time to a cause they are passionate about.
Prioritise physical and mental health
A company-wide wellness initiative helps standardise and improve employee engagement. Sponsor exercise classes as company outings and consider offering fitness grants to encourage healthy lifestyles outside the office.
Offer meditation classes and encourage your employees to attend mental health days when they need to leave the office and focus on themselves. Plus, stock the office pantry with healthy snacks to fuel employees through the busy workday.
It is not easy for remote workers to come to the office for every other event mentioned above. So, uKnowva HRMS helps companies track the happiness of every worker, including those working remotely. It has a happiness metre embedded in its virtual biometric system. This helps team leaders and reporting managers to know if their employees are happy and tired at a given time.
They wouldn’t have to ask the employee directly. The employee can genuinely punch in and out with the right emoticon without confronting the employer. This tool empowers employees to be self-aware about their mood of the day at any given time when they log in or log out. It is essential for employees as well to know if they are happy, satisfied, and engaged with their work.
They wouldn’t be able to lie or manipulate the scores for a long time. The insights are impacted by their workflow performances. So, this activity teaches employees to be self-reliant in a subtle way.
Recognise and reward top performances
You can usually identify the most engaged employees because they are the ones who go the extra mile in their jobs. You must acknowledge their efforts with an integrated and streamlined performance management module.
Companies can leverage uKnowva’s performance management system here for that. It is simplified and unified with other functions like payroll, timesheets & projects, and leaves and attendance. So, everything is recorded from the employees’ end into the system.
It becomes easy for reporting managers and team leaders to reward their employees without any bias or favouritism.
Conduct frequent employee engagement surveys
Regular employee engagement surveys identify what’s working in your business and make your employees feel valued.
uKnowva HRMS allows every employee to create polls and surveys. It also stores various survey templates in its document repository. So you don’t have to design it again once the template is ready. The survey can be rolled out in the discussion forum or published for everyone to see and participate in.
The activity saves time for the one who rolls out the survey. Also, they can configure the rules to show the survey to a specific group of users on the system. It is because not every survey is for everyone. Hence, the employee engagement survey can be targeted and mapped accordingly.
With these surveys, team leaders would know their members’ innermost concerns and queries. They can surmise the analysis from each survey response and know how to go about it later.
These detailed surveys make it easy to draw and design intelligent decisions for improving the team’s tandem and momentum. But these surveys cannot be implemented daily. These have to be published once in a while or have a schedule for it.
Conclusion
The two biggest factors driving employee engagement are educating managers and maintaining high standards. In addition to engaging management, equip your executives and senior managers with the rig tools to connect and enhance their senior-subordinate relationships.
Offer leadership development training programs and seminars to better prepare managers for their roles. Managers can engage employees effectively by having conversations about how they enjoy receiving feedback and recognition. Additionally, uKnowva HRMS helps implement most of the strategies listed above for new-age managers and team leaders.
