For businesses who want to get ahead of others, will understand the value of employee engagement, and will make sure the employees are happy in the workplace – but how can they achieve this? It’s not uncommon for businesses to spend large sums on money on team building, external speakers and expensive training, but there’s no silver bullet.
Improving employee engagement isn’t something which can simply be bought or applied to a business. There are multiple aspects which need to be addressed and several areas of an employee’s role and the working environment needs to be optimised and nurtured in order to deliver real employee engagement.
While these ways certainly don’t cover every aspect of employee engagement, we’ve listed below 10 more ways of doing it. Read till the end to know which is beneficial for your business, and how quickly you can implement it and what are the chances of getting successful. For businesses of different sizes, some tips may be easier to use while other tips will be more effective than others.
- Give positive feedback
It may sound simple, but ensuring your team receives (deserved) regular positive feedback is a crucial aspect of improving employee engagement. When a member of a team receives positive feedback for a piece of work, an idea, or for their enthusiasm in the workplace, it is a major boost for their confidence, makes the employee punctual and helps to improve their engagement at work.
Try to ensure that managers and team leaders have a full understanding of a members’ workflow, and know when they are finishing key tasks and projects or meeting key milestones, and also ensure that positive feedback is provided.
- Link your teams work to wider business goals
It can be easy for an employee who is simply filling in spreadsheets all day to get a sense that their job doesn’t matter or isn’t important. In today’s modern business, there will be many roles similar to this. Finding a way to link these roles with wider business goals and objectives helps to show the employee that their work matters, and it makes a big difference for the entire business.
Consider including a shout out to these kinds of employees during company or team updates, and how their work and dedication has helped to achieve certain company goals and objectives. Try to link their tasks and projects with wider company goals within their personal development plans.
- Offer high value training
One of the major reasons employees leave a business, and don’t feel engaged in their role, is a lack of required training. Not only does training help to improve employee engagement, it also goes a long way in developing more proficient employees and teams, which has many benefits for the business.
Spend time with each employee to identify which areas of their role they are currently struggling with, or spot opportunities to upskill in related areas. For example, for someone working in a development role, whose main priority is to support the sales team, it could be very beneficial to offer them training on the sales software so that they have a full grasp of the techniques used by the sales team.
- Develop a high quality onboarding process
Most businesses will have some form of onboarding process for new staff, but many are bare minimum and often feel ad-hoc, which doesn’t instil a lot of confidence in the new hire and can lead to low employee engagement. Ensure your HR team has the time.
Consider using a dedicated platform such as CIPHR HR software which has a dedicated onboarding service to streamline the entire process and ensure nothing is missed or substandard. A key reason for new hires leaving within the first 6 months of employment is often cited as a lack of onboarding and initial training – don’t be that business.
