Engaged employees are more productive and excited about their work. However, getting your employees to feel engaged with your company is no small feat. Encouraging employee involvement requires excellent leadership communication, recognizing their hard work and providing the right resources to ensure all employees feel adequately supported in their positions.
In today’s workplace, employee engagement is vital for keeping staff connected and inspired in their workplaces. To ensure your engagement strategy is successful, you must ground your methods in employee feedback and data, making tracking and measuring employee involvement vital to your business’s success.
Why Measure Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is the mental and emotional connection an employee feels towards their workplace. Currently, 36% of employees in the United States feel engaged at work. As employee quitting rates continue to rise, many organizations are placing a greater emphasis on employee engagement as it encourages employees to work harder and stay at a company longer.
However, you can’t foster employee engagement unless you understand what engages or disengages your employees in the first place. Some reasons why you should measure employee engagement include:
- Identify strengths and problem areas: Making an effort to regularly measure participation allows you to overcome any obstacles before they become problems. You can also use engagement data to view what is going well in your company or determine which departments are doing better than others.
- Build trust: Asking for feedback shows you care about your employees’ opinions and working experience. Use your feedback sessions to build trust with your employees so they are more likely to provide honest feedback about their experiences.
- Help everyone understand engagement: After obtaining your engagement data, share your results with all employees. Making this data accessible for everyone enables all employees to understand what is happening in your company and contribute solutions.
- Understand trends: Measuring employee engagement allows you to understand what is happening in your organization and compare your results to other industry benchmarks. This data also shows how your organization is or isn’t progressing.
How to Measure Employee Engagement
If you’re a strategic leader of your organization, you’ll want to learn what types of employee engagement are working and address areas that could use improvement. Some actions you may take to measure engagement are:
- Invest in individual contributors: Employees who do not wish to work in a leadership position should still have room for growth in your organization. One way to measure employee engagement is to create a formal ongoing learning policy so employees can continue to improve their skills.
- Send pulse surveys: Sending surveys throughout the year allows you to keep a pulse on engagement. Keeping these polls short and sweet will enable you to see any issues which require immediate attention and which areas are working well within your organization.
- Conduct stay interviews: Instead of waiting until the exit interview to gain feedback, plan time with each employee to understand what they are currently enjoying and if they have any suggestions for improvement. You can conduct these interviews as needed or annually to provide a qualitative measurement of employee engagement.
- Create a focus group: If you would like to learn how to measure employee engagement without surveys, focus groups are an excellent alternative. Choose employees from specific departments or combine staff from across the company to create a broader outlook.
- Look at productivity rate: Divide your revenue for a year or quarter by your number of employees. Compare your results across multiple departments and look for trends or patterns.
Ways to Increase Employee Engagement
While increasing employee engagement is not a complex process, it must be a priority for your company to be effective. Some methods you can utilize to increase engagement include:
- Scheduling regular meetings: Learning how to improve employee engagement begins with asking your employees how they feel in their current roles and what steps you can take to improve their positions. Regular meetings allow you to correct issues promptly and find areas for improvement.
- Putting all employees in the proper role: Having your employees in positions best suited for their skills is the best way to increase engagement. To ensure your employees are in the correct position, check that your talent acquisition and retention strategies align with company goals.
- Providing the right tools for success: If your employees often experience barriers to completing tasks, it can decrease engagement. For example, if your employees must memorize four or five different passwords to access company resources, they may benefit from a more straightforward login procedure.
- Offering training opportunities: Setting your team up for success with the proper training and development can build a culture of trust and accountability while improving engagement.
- Discussing engagement: The key to being a successful manager is to be transparent in your approach to improving engagement with your team. Hold meetings and make an effort to engage all employees in the discussion and possible solutions.
- Giving rewards and recognition: Making awards and recognition well-known throughout an organization can help increase engagement. Sending a clear message of appreciation shows workers how they fit into the company mission and what kind of behavior warrants an award.
Actions to Take
After identifying areas of your organization you can improve to boost employee engagement, it’s best to take action as soon as possible. Some steps you may take to increase employee engagement and improve your overall workplace culture include:
- Strong communication: Communicating your company goals and offering chances to communicate with employees through meetings, emails or video conferences will enable employees to ask questions, raise concerns and feel that you value their opinions.
- Employee bonding: Creating opportunities for employees to bond, identifying points of conflict and organizing chances to connect outside work enables you to build a positive work environment and improve employee engagement.
- Effective training and onboarding: An effective onboarding program prevents confusion and allows all new employees to understand what you expect from them and fully engage with their workplace.
- Craft a handbook for all leaders: A measuring and increasing employee engagement guide allows all leaders in your organization to learn how they can increase engagement and improve company operations.
- Stress management: Disengagement can result from stress making it essential to encourage stress management, such as encouraging breaks and setting realistic deadlines.
- Employee appreciation: Look for opportunities to praise your workers or ask them how they would like to receive recognition for their hard work.
Get Started by Providing a Catered Meal for Your Team
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