Boost Your Employee Engagement As a Manager Effectively
Has employee engagement declined in your workplace? If this is the case, don’t be alarmed; every organization is vulnerable to changes in their team’s engagement levels, which are usually the result of a shift in their company culture.
Improving employee engagement call for the support of your entire leadership team, and a successful engagement strategy necessitates careful planning. Don’t be discouraged; a highly engaged workforce will increase your company’s profitability, productivity, and retention.
However, there are several low-lift employee engagement initiatives that you can implement right now to produce actual results. This article will look at employee engagement strategies that you can use as both short-term fixes and long-term strategies to increase employee engagement.
Communicate Effectively
As organizations grow, the ties that bind coworkers can loosen and weaken, resulting in departments working in isolation and staff becoming disconnected from their colleagues before it’s too late. Unless you have a dedicated internal communications team, HR will likely be in charge of company communications (possibly with assistance from your marketing team).
You should start communicating news more frequently and purposefully wherever your employees spend their time – digitally or physically. Simple steps like using your intranet or HR system, or even putting up posters in common areas, will help keep your employees informed of what’s going on, whether it’s a change in your HR policies or the good news about a client.
Managers who work remotely or manage remote teams must be more intentional about their communications; you should encourage them to fully utilize your chosen digital tools (such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Workplace by Facebook, for example) and listing regular check-ins with their direct reports and management colleagues.
Invest In Wellbeing
Engage For Success (E4S), which has been at the forefront of UK employee engagement research, has argued that engagement and wellbeing are inextricably linked. Wendy Cartwright, a task force member, told HR magazine in 2014 that “where there is high engagement but low wellbeing, there is a risk of burnout over time, and where there is high wellbeing but low engagement, employees may feel generally satisfied and well but are disconnected from the organizational purpose.”
Creating a healthy workplace, such as by implementing an employee assistance program (EAP), training mental health first aiders, and promoting healthy eating and exercise, can all help to improve employee wellbeing. However, you should consider your organization’s culture and the behaviors it expects employees to exhibit.
Accept Feedback And Act Accordingly
Employee voice is one of E4S’s four “enablers” of engagement: it is sought, listened to, and acted on by senior leaders and managers. Technology makes it easier than ever for employers to seek and collect employee feedback regularly – such as through anonymous online surveys – but introducing such tools will have little impact if leaders do not value and respond to their employees’ opinions. It may necessitate a cultural shift that your organization isn’t yet prepared for, so consider how, when, and why you might want to establish formal feedback channels.
Encourage employees
It’s understandable that some leaders resort to micromanagement during times of crisis or when team members are incompetent or unable to meet tight deadlines. Employee engagement is endangerment when micromanagement becomes the norm. Constant correction and negative feedback will sap workers’ enthusiasm and creativity. Workflows will be stifled by managers who act as impediments to action. Retention and recruitment will suffer as a result.
Recognize The Hard Work
Does your company recognize and reward its employees regularly, public and willing basis? Even if a few of your leaders and managers express gratitude to their employees, there is always more work to be done – at all levels of an organization. Creating digital channels for employees to thank one another for going above and beyond – Totem is a great example – or implementing an incentive-based scheme or awards program are excellent ways to cultivate a public thanks and recognition culture.
Summarizing
Now that you understand what employee engagement is, why it is essential, and how to increase employee engagement, it is time to get to work! You should set up a company intranet if you haven’t already.
The future of work depends on employees having access to everything they need in one location. What better way to accomplish this than with a digital workplace solution?
