8 Best Practices for Driving Employee Engagement
Publié le 10 February 2022
Creating a more engaged workforce offers many benefits for employers and employees alike, all the more reason to utilize the 8 best practices for driving employee engagement.
A substantial proportion of your organization’s success is dependent on the dedication and commitment of your employees. Success is almost certain if the organization’s workforce shows a high level of devotion to their work. In order to keep the employees motivated, the organization must adopt best practices for driving employee engagement.
Employee engagement refers to the workforce’s level of dedication and commitment towards their assigned jobs. In the modern business world, due importance must be given to driving employee engagement. Having an amicable relationship between the employees and the company is one of the most important aspects of organizational success.
Companies that attribute their growth to their workforce’s efforts and commitment, should focus on fostering high employee engagement. If you are looking for ways to help you adopt best practices that can help you improve employee engagement, you have landed on the right article.
The 8 Best Practices For Driving Employee Engagement:
- Get Onboarding Right
- Proper Training
- Using The Right Tools
- Develop Trust
- Keep Work Culture
- Recognize and Reward Employee Efforts
- Do Not Forget Core Values
- Listen To Feedback
Get Onboarding Right
As per a recent report, compared to the disengaged employees, an exceptionally engaged workforce feels 2.3x more confident in the company’s onboarding program.
The human resources department of an organization puts in huge efforts to find the right candidate. They use various practices such as cold recruiting emails, referrals, job portals, and other methods to find the right candidate. The work shouldn’t end there, however.
The organization’s employees must realize that onboarding offers a great opportunity to connect with new hires. It gives you a chance to develop the right attitude in your new employees and ensure that their training is accurate, which will allow them to perform their duties with clear conviction.
Think about it this way – if you keep your employees motivated right from the start, they are more likely to perform better. The best practices of onboarding include:
- Proper introduction of the new members with the co-workers.
- Introducing mentors who can offer the necessary guidance to them when needed.
- Involving executive leadership in the process of onboarding
- Ensuring the smooth transition from onboarding to the designated work of the new employees.
Proper Training
An employee can only perform effectively if they have been trained properly. When the employees are trained correctly, they will be able to understand their role from the beginning and start contributing to the success of the organization right away. Moreover, the work simply becomes more enjoyable when the tasks don’t appear confusing. The use of LMS or learning management systems combined with project management and planning tools and various communication tools helps to facilitate proper training.
Proper training also requires the use of adequate tools. For example, a digital marketing company needs to ensure that their employees are equipped and trained with proper SEO tools.
If the organization does not focus on giving ample training, its employees are deemed to get discouraged easily. When the employees encounter constant hurdles in their tasks as a result of improper training, they cannot contribute much to organizational growth. Ensuring that training and onboarding are done correctly is one of the best practices for driving employee engagement.
Using The Right Tools
The pandemic has led organizations to adopt innovative and useful tools to help them with proper employee management. Working from home and other remote working arrangements requires more effort from a remote leader since it is not as easy to develop an effective work culture when employees are not in the same physical space.
Maintaining productivity, facilitating work collaborations, properly addressing employee concerns are some of the common issues faced during these trying times.
One of the most effective practices that have come up during this phase is using the right tools to recruit and manage employees. Popular tools that gained wide acceptance worldwide during the pandemic are Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, along with project management tools like Trello, Basecamp, Monday.com, and others.
The interesting thing is that employees favor using such platforms since it allows them to communicate with all team members easily. Driving employee engagement is one of the positive outcomes of using the right tools within the organization. Even the top startup marketing agencies have shown a preference for using such tools for flawless remote work.
Develop Trust
An uncertain work environment would never reap the desired results for organizations. This has become an area of concern during the ongoing pandemic. Prospective and current employees are correct to seek more clarity about the organization’s stability, plans, and growth prospects. You cannot expect the employees to be highly engaged if they are constantly bothered by the thoughts of uncertainty.
“Uncertainty also hampers the productivity of the employee, which in fact affects the company’s growth. The more trust your employees have in you the more you will grow.”
– Paulo from Wumblers
Companies need to adopt transparent practices so that the possibility of confusion or doubt is minimized within the workforce. Another factor that is of utmost importance is that every employee must be kept in the loop about any relevant plans or changes that would directly impact their employment.
Consider these two examples to understand why developing trust is important for better employee engagement.
Examples:
1. Say, you want to lay off unproductive employees from the organization, but this information is not yet disclosed. You send a direct email to the ones that have been identified as unproductive candidates.
What impression would it create on your employees when they find out from external sources that some of their colleagues have been laid off? Even if your reasons to remove them were right, your impression would fall to the negative side. Moreover, clarifying after other employees seek it would not help develop the same trust level.
2. You find it difficult to manage and supervise your team’s work remotely, so decide to start using tools to monitor their work. Most of your employees would appreciate openness if you kept them informed. However, using such practices by hiding them shows that you do not trust them. Also, doing so without their knowledge gives them a strong reason not to trust you. This wouldn’t be a harmonious work culture, and one cannot expect better employee engagement through such practices.
Keeping them informed and being clear and open in your communication would make them feel respected and develop trust. The atmosphere of trust within the organization acts like a strong pillar and is one of the best practices for driving employee engagement.
Keep Work Culture Transparent
As per a poll, about 55% of the employees fear for their job security during the pandemic. The same report also demonstrates that only half of the employees believe they are getting regular company updates. Not being unable to focus on account of fear and uncertainty would make for a poor work environment, create unnecessary stress and prevent proper employee engagement.
The past two years have taught organizations a great deal about the unpredictability of the future. There is nothing wrong with keeping a transparent work culture and keeping your employees informed, even if the details are woeful.
On the contrary, the organizations who openly communicate with their workforce have better chances of gaining their trust. Such organizations can use their presence on social media to this advantage to keep everyone informed about the latest developments.
Keeping them informed about your plans and strategies helps them gain confidence in the organization’s future. It shows that you are a bold company with the resilience to face any circumstances.
You can be positive in the communication but make sure not to over-promise. Say what you mean and nothing else. Being clear and precise while communicating with your employees is the key to developing a transparent work culture. When the employees know that they work in a trustable and transparent environment, they tend to work with great dedication, which drives employee engagement.
Recognize and Reward Employee Efforts
We work for reward and recognition. Almost every employee craves appreciation, and the need to recognize their efforts has increased during the pandemic. Your team is putting in great efforts to keep things running and growing. It is not easy to work remotely and still perform as per the management’s expectations.
If you wish to keep your employees motivated, then make sure to celebrate even the smallest of achievements. You will be astonished by seeing what it does to the workforce’s morale even while working remotely.
Rewards can be monetary or in a different form that demonstrates appreciation. A motivated employee’s efforts demonstrate the desired employee engagement or set the benchmark. Feeling acknowledged and appreciated is one of the most effective and best practices for driving employee engagement.
Do Not Forget Core Values
Every activity in the organization should revolve around the core values. Your work culture would be defined by your values, as everything is guided by what the company believes in. Even during the pandemic, you must strive to uphold your core values at all times.
Employees are enticed by an organization that does not deviate from its core values. Show them that you are focused and that your goals are backed with strong values. It will motivate them to perform with greater efforts and enhance employee engagement.
For example, Databox, a hybrid SaaS company, now has employees from 7 different countries. They have recently put a lot of effort into outlining their values and strengthening company culture, not just to increase employee satisfaction and attract new hires but also to keep employees engaged. With the rise of remote culture, they’ve clearly outlined their team identity, followed by joint remote activities (for example by forming a book club, “Trip around the equator” organizing remote walking/running challenges, etc.) that support their culture and team’s values.
Feedback
Employee engagement has a direct relation to feedback. As per a report, highly engaged employees are 2.3 times more likely to point out that their feedback is taken seriously by the organization than disengaged employees.
Feedback works both ways – your feedback to employees and their feedback to the organization. Actively taking action on the feedback is what promotes high employee engagement. Being heard and given feedback to help them improve are the driving factors that make them feel like an integral part of the organization.
One of the best practices for driving employee engagement is to develop a feedback driven work culture. By gathering feedback and using it to take action in the workplace, it will show employees that their thoughts and opinions matter and deepen their commitment to the company.
Final Words
As the nature of work changes for various companies, one thing that remains constant is that engaged employees are necessary for continued growth and success. The 8 best practices for driving employee engagement discussed here are not complex and can easily be adapted to fit into any workplace.
The importance of adopting best practices has become even more important during these trying times. You can easily choose the ones that fit your organizational structure and see the results for yourself.
