What does employee disengagement really mean for your business? It’s not just about your employees being dissatisfied or demotivated in the workplace. It’s also about how this affects your business productivity, and ultimately, your bottom line.
Employee disengagement can become a real issue for any business. That’s why employee engagement initiatives should be just as important as your business growth strategies and goals. After all, a happy employee is a productive employee. And productivity equates to profit.
To learn more about helpful and realistic employee engagement tactics, check out this blog for more.
The Importance of Employee Engagement Initiatives
As a business owner, you might be surprised that research shows only 15 percent of employees are truly ”engaged” at work. This doesn’t sound like a very promising figure, does it? But what does employee engagement really mean?
Engagement translates to employees that are highly involved in all work activities and enthusiastic about your workplace.
Sure, your employees can’t be 100 percent positive and jovial at all times. But a major lack of engagement can have serious productivity and profitability consequences.
The same research shows that businesses with good employee engagement are 21 percent more profitable. If you want a slice of that pie, you’d better prioritize your employee engagement initiatives.
What’s important to remember is that employee engagement is separate from job satisfaction. An employee can be satisfied with what they’re earning and the work they do. But when it comes to location, company culture, and individual characteristics, this is what shapes engagement.
This means that employee engagement is also quite individual — what may work for one employee, may not offer the same result with another. This is why you have to stay on top of your employee engagement initiatives on a regular basis and meet your team’s unique needs.
Here are a few proven ideas to improve how your employees engage with your business:
1. Communicate Openly, and Often
Whether your business is on the smaller side, with a small staff complement, or on the larger side, open lines of communication are imperative. This is especially important as your organization starts to grow. You don’t want the ties that bind co-workers and management to loosen and cause a major disconnect.
You want to prioritize your internal communications. Whether you dedicate your own department to this or assign the responsibility to your HR, or your marketing team. Check out this guide for the best technology to streamline your internal communications, too.
Your internal communications should include both company and personalized bits of news. And you should communicate with employees regularly. Figure out the best way to communicate with your employees that will make the greatest impact. Whether it’s digitally or on a company news board.
You want to keep your employees in the loop at all times as this shows them that they are valuable to you. Regular communication helps your employees to feel important and seen. You can consistently encourage internal communication with a variety of different tools. Some of these include Microsoft Teams, Workplace, Facebook, and Slack.
2. Make Employee Wellbeing a Major Priority
Employee engagement and their wellbeing are closely linked. Even if an employee is well engaged with your business, but their wellbeing is neglected, this can lead to instances of burnout. If there is a sense of well-being but disengagement, your employees may start to lose sight of their purpose and motivation in the workplace.
In short, it’s important to have a good balance of both in order to build and maintain a healthy work environment.
You need to take steps to prioritize employee health by implementing employee assistance programs (EAPs). You can also train mental health first aiders, promote healthy eating, exercise, and ways to improve employee moods.
Along with this, you’ll need to dive into a deeper look at your workplace culture and its behaviors. If your business has a culture of working late or long hours or weekends, think about how this impacts employee well-being.
Does your business have an issue with office politics, gossip, and internal drama? You’ll need to identify the root causes of these problems and work on stamping them out. When you take a long, hard look at your business culture keep your employee health — both physical and mental in mind.
From there, you’ll have to create action plans to tackle cultural and behavioral issues.
3. Encourage Open and Honest Employee Feedback
A major player in employee engagement is the employee voice. You want your team to feel ”heard” by encouraging their feedback on a regular basis. Let them know that you value what they have to say, and will take it to heart.
When employee views are sought out, listened to, and acted upon, this is the best way to let your employees know that they matter, and can make a difference.
With the aid of technology on your side, it’s now simpler than ever to create employee feedback forms and collate their honest feedback. You can ensure the online surveys are anonymous, which only encourages better honesty.
Once you’ve assessed employee feedback, make sure you thank them for it. You should also outline the realistic changes you plan to make in reaction to their feedback.
4. Have a Clear Organizational Purpose and Live By It
Any employee will quickly realize when they’re working for a phony. And this does not bode well for employee engagement, satisfaction, or commitment. You don’t want your organization to be ”all talk” and no real action.
That’s why you have to carefully consider your business’s purpose, and make sure you are authentic in how you carry out your vision, mission, and goals. Ultimately, this breeds deep-rooted employee respect, commitment, and enthusiasm about your business.
Ensure your organizational commitments are lived out by senior leaders and all management team members. As the saying goes, you must ”lead by example”.
You want to keep your HR policies up-to-date and aligned with your organizational mission and values, too. Don’t forget that reward and recognition must also closely align with your business goals.
5. Put Real Effort Into Empowering Employees
Nobody, and we mean nobody, enjoys being micromanaged in the workplace. Yes, in some situations it may be necessary, such as a business crisis. But in general, micromanagement does not belong in a business where you aim to empower employees.
When micromanagement starts to become the norm, employee engagement goes out the window. Your employees will begin to feel like you just don’t trust them. Not only this, but their creativity will take a back seat due to the constant barrage of negative feedback and correction.
Your only alternative is to empower your employees. You can do this by supporting them, trusting in them, and allowing them to work autonomously. If they need guidance, encourage them to seek it out at any point. You want to let them figure things out for themselves, but not drown in the process.
If you notice micromanagement in action, you want to speak to that team member about their management style and how it needs to change.
6. Always Praise and Recognize Good Work
Even if you recognize and thank your staff members for their efforts on a regular basis, this is simply not enough. There is always more than you can do to show your appreciation at all levels of your business.
You want to create open lines of communication through digital channels in which staff can highlight and praise each other’s work. They can also thank each other for going the extra mile — the recognition should not only be at a management level.
You can also put incentive-based schemes and reward programs in place in order to cultivate a motivated and engaged team.
7. Run Your Business With Engaging Management
It’s no use trying to create and encourage engagement in your staff members if your managers do not have an engaging attitude. As mentioned before, you have to lead by example.
Your managers’ levels of engagement have a direct impact on their team members. If a manager is enthusiastic and passionate about what they do, this rubs off on all of their team members.
The engagement is tangible and hard to deny if you are surrounded by it on a daily basis. Eventually, your employees will catch on to the motivation and run with it.
8. Offer Inspiring Volunteer Opportunities
You want to create an environment that lets your employees know that you care about your contribution to society. The best way to do this is to get involved with volunteer work and charities and let your employees get involved, too.
Volunteer work has a way of uniting employees for a larger purpose. If they had their differences before, working together during volunteer work may help them to overcome obstacles.
If employees already have a good relationship, volunteer work will help them to connect on an even deeper level. Volunteer opportunities also boost morale, which creates a better work environment, overall.
Seek out volunteer opportunities close to your workplace and organize after-work volunteer get-togethers. You could also establish a volunteer day as an employee benefit, i.e. employees can take the full day off work to carry out volunteer work.
9. Make Mental and Physical Health a Priority
Mental health in the workplace is a big deal. It has a direct impact on the well-being and productivity of your employees, so why wouldn’t you make it a priority? Mental well-being can also play a role in how employees engage with one another, which can also impact the overall vibe of your business.
It’s easier for employees to engage with your business when they are in a good mental headspace. Company-wide well-being initiatives are the best way to tap into your team’s mental well-being and make a positive impact.
Physical health is just as important. We touched on this earlier, but when your employees are in good physical health they are more alert, driven, and engaging.
A good way to prioritize good physical health is to sponsor workout classes. You could also host weekend fitness retreats, or offer fitness subsidies to encourage a healthy lifestyle.
You could also create a dedicated space in your office devoted to mental and physical well-being. This could include a quiet room where employees can take a nap, meditate or just relax during their lunch break. Make sure to stock your kitchen and office with healthy snacks or a juice bar instead of high-sugar treats.
10. Get Your Team Out of the Office
It doesn’t only serve you to develop relationships with team members in an office environment. You want to get your employees out of this environment to learn more about them and develop interpersonal relationships.
Your employee engagement hinges on how your employees relate and react to one another. The more they can connect as individuals, the better the workplace environment will be as a whole.
Set up a networking opportunity for employees at least once a month outside of the office. Whether it’s a team sports day, an evening of dinner and drinks, or an office game night, it’s important to change up the socialization environment.
11. Offer Personal Growth Opportunities
There’s nothing that will motivate your employees more than the opportunity to advance in their careers. This is one of the best ways to show your employees that you are committed to them and what they can offer the world — even if they don’t work for you forever!
Employees who feel like their career is going somewhere are also more likely to commit to your business and remain loyal. This is also a smart way to retain your best talent, too.
To add to this, your business market, no matter what industry, is always evolving and growing. You need to keep your employees trained and up-to-date on all business trends in order to create a truly knowledgeable team.
Your Ultimate Portal of Business Knowledge
With these employee engagement initiatives, you can create a workplace that emphasizes the value of its team. Because what would any business be without its employees? The consistent effort is worth the reward of happy employees, productivity, and profitability.
If you’re a business owner on the hunt for knowledge — whether it’s starting a business, payroll, service contracts, sales, bids, and estimates, this site is for you. Explore for more and build a better business.
