How can an organization increase engagement at the workplace? Well, it’s really simple: Know your audience. But before organizations can learn their audience, they need to find, hire and equip managers to effectively engage staff to add to organizational success.
Organizations can gauge their employee’s level of engagement using a variety of tools and metrics, such as surveys, scorecards, listening tours, suggestion boxes and other methods that are directed at helping to understand employees. This ultimately accomplishes three main objectives:
1. Motivation: Employees are the heartbeat of an organization, and properly assessing what motivates them can build an environment that emphasizes an employee-centric ethos.
2. Direct engagement: Employees are provided a voice in the shaping of their work environment. It is critically important to acknowledge the suggestions, thoughts and feelings of your staff so that they know that their input matters.
3. Measurement: Define the values that your organization is seeking to measure as it relates to effective engagement. Once the values are defined, evaluate changes and chart any positive developments made to determine an engagement effort's success or failure on an ongoing basis.
It’s important to note that when crafting engagement surveys and soliciting suggestions, organizations should take care to be deliberate so that outcomes are actionable to viably improving the workplace and understanding what motivates employees. There’s nothing worse than setting expectations that can’t truly be met.
There are many strategies that can be employed that may be used to achieve greater levels of engagement, employee satisfaction and increased productivity.
Let’s start with a few cultural norms that can be easily put in place:
1. Training and professional development: Employees naturally want to grow. It's not healthy or productive to expect staff to remain in stasis. If you want to see greater levels of happiness, start by investing in your people. I am a firm believer that people want to do well and add value. If an employee feels that their career is stagnating, they are more apt to seek out opportunities that will help fulfill their personal and professional growth.
2. A culture of inclusion and belonging: Many times, I have seen organizations espouse certain beliefs in the interview process and in their mission and values, but when you look behind the proverbial curtain, you find that the values and the expressed culture are incongruent. Organizations that seek greater productivity need to focus on making the values more than just a talking point but a reality. If not, employees will notice the inconsistency and won’t remain engaged for long, particularly if they feel they were misled.
3. Togetherness: Piggybacking off of inclusion, you want to nurture team dynamics and create team cohesiveness. People who’ve worked in the trenches together understand each other’s abilities and how to best pull together to get things done. It establishes a deeper trust.
4. Pay-to-stay: In other words, pay a competitive wage. This might sound like a no-brainer but many people associate their value with their compensation to a large degree. Make sure you are at least meeting the market for the work that your employees do each and every day. If pay increases are out of the question, bonuses, cash prizes, gift cards and other monetary incentives help motivate staff.
5. Transparency: Some organizations are not very good at conveying their values or communicating why the mission impacts staff. One organization I used to work for would hold monthly meetings where we would learn the organizational goals and how they aligned with our departments as well as our individual efforts. It allowed us to ask questions of our senior leadership team, to see our contributions, and learn how they impacted the larger goals.
6. Feedback looping: Provide feedback and do so freely. Employees want to know how they are doing and also want to know that they can give feedback. A two-way feedback loop encourages innovation, greater trust and collaboration.
7. Recognition: It’s important to acknowledge and celebrate people. Recognizing employees' great ideas, accomplishments and other milestones help them feel valued. Recognition costs nothing, but it’s worth its weight in gold.
8. Trust and empowerment: Trust your employees and give them the autonomy to make decisions. Empowerment builds greater confidence, develops emerging leaders and decreases stifling micromanagement that impedes innovation.
A well-thought-out and effective engagement strategy ultimately achieves increased productivity and fulfillment for staff, which corresponds to the brand, its customers and the organization overall.
