The Employee Engagement, or work commitment, is the emotional state that employees have when they feel connected with the organization and its goals.
Engaged employees are more involved in their work, have higher levels of motivation and satisfaction, and are more loyal. Consequently, employees with strong engagement are more productive, are more likely to remain in the company, and help spread a positive brand image.
On the other hand, those companies that fail to engage their employees see how their teams are disinterested, unmotivated, less productive, and end up leaving the business.
Why is Employee Engagement important?
It’s important that companies invest time in employee engagement initiatives because they have a very positive direct impact on organization’s performance and results.
As we’ve already mentioned, engaged employees are more productive, motivated, and more likely to choose to stay with the organization over job offers from competitors.
Also, employee engagement strategies make team members go above and beyond, which leads them to have a greater capacity for innovation and creativity.
For all these reasons, work commitment helps companies offer better services, which increases consumer satisfaction, generates higher incomes and allows them to maintain a strong position in the market.
So, now that you know how essential it is, let’s see how to improve employee engagement.
10 Ideas to improve the Employee Engagement of your team
Next, we share with you 10 tips to improve your work commitment strategy and boost the loyalty of your team:
1. Involve your employees in decision-making processes
Help your collaborators feel more engaged in the success of the company by including them in the decision-making processes.
A good way to do this is by creating spaces where employees can share their ideas and expectations on the issues that most influence their day to day. You can create an internal forum, use weekly or monthly meetings, or implement a tool to gather feedback through employee surveys to give your workforce a voice.
2. Ensure wellness support tools and create a healthy work environment
Emotional health plays a fundamental role in employee performance. Supporting them and being by their side whenever they need it helps boost employee engagement by making team members feel cared and valued.
Undoubtedly, this is a very competitive factor that makes a difference with other companies and that tips the balance in your favor in matters of loyalty.
To do this, you can provide your workforce with wellness programs, resources for mental health support, and create courses and workshops that promote healthy habits inside and outside the office.
3. Promote work-life balance
Work-life balance is one of the elements that employees value the most, especially those who are part of the younger generations.
If we let people just focus on their work, we run the risk of developing problems like Burnout Syndrome, a depression-like illness that has serious consequences for employee health and performance.
For this reason, to maximize the results of your work employee engagement strategy, it’s convenient to consider aspects such as flexible hours, hybrid work and moments of rest that ensure that your employees properly disconnect from their professional activities.
4. Foster a sense of purpose and meaning in work
If we want to engage employees with the goals of the company, it’s imperative that we help them understand how their hard work contributes to the greater good. Or, in other words, we have to help them connect the meaning of their work with the purpose and mission of the organization.
So it’s a good idea to remind the company’s values from time to time, as well as share short and long-term goals so that employees see that their performance positively influences significant projects.
5. Enhance managers’ social skills
Team managers are a critical element of the employee engagement. They are the ones who spend the most time with employees, and for this reason, it’s essential that their management is effective and focused on people.
Employees don’t leave their job, they leave their bosses.
Therefore, train team leaders with the necessary skills to make workers feel comfortable and happy, and with enough confidence to share all the doubts and concerns that could be affecting the performance of the business.
Make sure that your managers know how to listen actively, practice empathy, give support and guide without micromanaging, and you will see how the rates of employee engagement will increase rapidly.
6. Offer opportunities for professional growth
Providing opportunities for employees to learn new skills and advance in their careers increases job satisfaction and engagement.
For this, it’s essential to make expectations clear from the beginning, leave out ambiguities, and point out what exactly employees must do if they want to move up the ranks within the organization.
This will give them an idea of the way forward and set the tone for the behavior of the most ambitious team members. To help them grow, you can include training courses, personalized tutorials, or discounts on tuition for masters and postgraduate courses relevant to their career.
7. Ensure an honest and transparent feedback culture
Create channels for open, two-way communication and encourage employees to share their ideas and feedback to increase employee engagement.
To make your job easier, you can implement regular 1:1 meetings or set up an automated feedback system to gather information from employees quickly and efficiently.
With the data collected, you can identify what works in your loyalty strategy, and what areas need to be improved to create a work environment that makes your company the best place to work.
8. Celebrate your team
Can you imagine what your business would be like without the people who are part of it? A positive culture, in which achievements and triumphs are celebrated, helps your employees feel more connected to both the company and their colleagues.
Organize teambuilding events, appreciate the efforts to move production forward, praise good ideas, celebrate important milestones… everything counts to create a feeling of belonging that boosts the work commitment of your workers.
9. Improve the experience of your onboardings
You know what they say, the first impression is what counts. Although it is true that many factors influence employee engagement, the onboarding is one of the most important.
According to a Wynhurst Group study, a good onboarding process increases employee engagement by 58%. And, in the same line, another paper by Brandon Hall indicates that a strong and structured Onboarding process increases talent retention up by 82%.
If you are interested, here is an article in which we explain how you can improve your welcome process with Team Insights .
10. Use specialized software to measure the Employee Engagement
Last but not least: you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
To refine your employee engagement strategy, you need to keep track and monitor the status of your employees’ engagement on a regular basis. Team Insights makes your job easier, allowing you to send periodic surveys automatically to assess the level of engagement of your team in real time.
The information provided will help you detect your strengths and areas for improvement, and thus be able to design initiatives that ensure you reach the desired level of engagement at all times without wasting time or money in the process.
7 Keys to boost Employee Engagement by 2023
To consolidate the information, here we leave you the 7 keys that you must take into account to improve the engagement of your employees:
- Maintain clear, transparent and two-way communication.
- Recognize and appreciate the people on your team.
- Offer professional development opportunities.
- Ensure the correct balance between personal and work life.
- Connect work with purpose.
- Use people-centered leadership.
- Measure work engagement on a regular basis with the help of a specialized tool.
With Team Insights, you can now start improving your Employee Engagement strategy and achieve spectacular results. And it’s free!
