We define employee engagement as the level of commitment and involvement an employee has towards their organisation and its values.
When employees are positively engaged with their organisation, they form an emotional connection with the company. This affects their attitude towards their colleagues and the company’s clients and improves customer satisfaction and service levels.
How do Engaged Employees Behave?
Engaged employees speak positively about the organisation to colleagues, potential employees and customers. Engaged employees have a strong desire to be a member of the company, and exert extra effort to contribute to the organisation’s success.
Factors which Affect Engagement
Many organisational factors influence employee engagement and retention such as:
• A culture of respect where outstanding work is valued
• Availability of constructive feedback and mentoring
• Opportunity for advancement and professional development
• Fair and appropriate reward, recognition and incentive systems
• Effective leadership
• Clear job expectations
• Adequate tools to complete work responsibilities
• High levels of motivation
Approaches to Employee Engagement
Many smart organisations work to develop and nurture engagement.
There’s more than one way to improve the level of employee engagement in a company. In fact, there are many different things that companies can do. If your organisation is to succeed you must use as many different approaches as you can.
Here is a round-up of some of the best approaches.
Recruitment & Selection
Best practice recommends starting right at the selection or recruitment stage with:
• Selecting the right person
• A strong induction and orientation programme
• Rigorous training and development, from technical to soft skills to leadership development programmes
• Hiring new talent to refresh the organisation
Communications activities
These help employees find out what is going on within the company outside of their immediate
team and within their team.
Examples of communications approaches include:
• On-line communications, including discussion boards and blogs by company personnel including senior management
• Monthly updates on organization, department, team goals and directions
• Active soliciting of employee feedback, including opinions and pet peeves
• Communication forums to provide regular feedback to all people, including team meetings, conferences and away days
• In-house magazines
Reward & Recognition schemes
Studies have long shown that, while money in itself is not a motivating factor, the absence of financial reward can be a significant de-motivator.
Typical approaches include:
• Compensation and benefit programmes
• Idea collection schemes linked to rewards for idea generation
• Long service awards
• Excellent performance awards
Team Building & Organisation Culture approaches
Culture-building activities are great for generating a feeling of belonging, but all organisations are built out of smaller teams who can get on and work together.
Popular approaches include small team outdoor and indoor team building activities and large organisation-wide events to nurture the vision, mission, and values of the organisation.
Leadership Development activities
A great organisation needs not just one great leader, but many people with leadership skills.
Leadership development, along with coaching and mentoring activities for leaders are critical to develop the essential leadership skills and to create an open and transparent culture to empower people.
Performance Management and Development activities
Effective performance management, fair evaluation of performance and the opportunity to develop and learn are key to an individual’s motivation at work.
Personal and Career Development activities
The opportunity to develop, learn, receive training, be assigned to new job opportunities and challenges, gain promotion, expand one’s job, develop skills in new areas and gain new work experiences are also key to an individual’s motivation at work and organisations should use a number of approaches in this regard.
How Engaged are Your Employees?
How will you know to what degree your employees are engaged?
The first step is to determine the current level of employee engagement. The best tool to determine this base line is a comprehensive employee satisfaction survey.
A well administered satisfaction survey will let you know at what level of engagement your employees are operating. Customizable satisfaction surveys will provide you with a starting point towards your efforts to optimize employee engagement.
The key to successful employee satisfaction surveys is to pay close attention to the feedback from your staff and take action on their specific concerns.
Employee engagement is crucial to any business, if you would like help in this matter, please contact us via email or Call 01 866 6426
