Increasing employee engagement is a cornerstone in creating a successful business. Gallop’s State of the Global Workplace report reveals that employee disengagement costs the US upwards of $550 billion a year in lost productivity.
On the other hand, having highly engaged employees with high energy and a desire to excel in their roles will help take your business beyond expectations.
There’s a fantastic opportunity for companies to learn and master the art of engagement. So in this post, I’ll share 5 powerful ways to increase employee engagement. But first, let’s look at why employee engagement is essential.
Why Is Employee Engagement Important?
A company depends on its employees to survive and thrive. If your employees are disengaged and just show up to clock in and out, they won’t do a good job. The productivity decreases, and the employee turnover rate may increase.
But when employees genuinely enjoy their job and are engaged, they’re motivated to work harder and more productively.
Engaged employees are more likely to be:
- Loyal and emotionally committed to the organization
- Enthusiastically invested in their work and more willing to take on responsibilities outside of their job description
- More likely to excel in their given roles
- Staying with the organization for longer and become emerging leaders
- More productive and better at dealing with customers
Now that you know why engaged employees are vital for any organization to succeed, let’s look a how to increase employee engagement:
1. Make Your Mission, Vision, and Values Clear
To boost engagement, employees need to know the purpose of the organization and its values. When companies incorporate their values into their employees’ daily work tasks, it helps foster a more meaningful work environment.
But you can’t just list your mission statement on your website or Intranet and expect employees to live by them. Instead, you need to integrate your company’s long-term vision and values into all functions within your business.
When employees have a strong understanding of the organization’s core values and mission and what they can do to create impact, they’re more likely to feel inspired and engaged.
2. Reward Your Employees
Recognition and rewards are essential to make employees feel seen and appreciated. For instance, employees who receive positive recognition often experience:
- Higher engagement and work morale
- Increased productivity
- A sense of loyalty to the company
- Better customer satisfaction
When you recognize and reward your employees, it offers a sense of accomplishment that can lead to higher engagement, productivity, retention, and loyalty towards the company. And you can easily do this by:
- Celebrating personal milestones, like birthdays and anniversaries
- Announcing new hires
- Sharing company success
- Using a cheers-for-peers system
- Offering individual bonus systems and promotions
3. Give Employees More Power
Another effective way to increase employee engagement is to include your team members in decision-making and goal-setting whenever possible.
If that’s not possible, try to be open to hearing their ideas and input. Engaged employees are shown to be the makers of fantastic new ideas for business growth, so being receptive is a must. And encouraging self-initiative and letting employees take on new projects will almost always boost engagement and motivation.
Remember to check in regularly and ask for feedback on how they are doing and if they would improve certain aspects of the organization—showing employees that their opinions matter will encourage them to do a better job and boost loyalty to the company.
4. Task Meaningful Work
Engaged employees want to know that what they do makes a difference and clearly understand how they contribute to the organization’s mission, purpose, and objectives.
So first of all, you need to make sure that employees understand the bigger picture of what the organization is trying to accomplish and their role in it.
With that comes also checking so that your team members are placed in the right role. If your team members don’t have a clear career path or role made out for them, they’ll likely leave.
Making sure each person has the proper role and informing them how their work is making an impact as a whole can be a powerful engagement and productivity booster.
5. Measure Employee Engagement
Lastly, successful managers are transparent in their approach to improving engagement, and they also take steps to measure it.
For instance, creating an employee engagement survey can help your business get a view of its current state of engagement. It helps you see the areas where your organization could improve and where it excels.
Employee engagement surveys provide a safe space for employees where they can give feedback and feel heard. The fact that you can make them fully anonymous allows workers to offer genuine feedback without the fear of losing their job.
Over to You
And there, you have 5 powerful ways to increase employee engagement. Implementing these principles can help your business drive greater financial returns, get ahead of the competition, and become one of the best companies to work for.