High employee engagement correlates with higher revenue growth and customer satisfaction. Get the 5 tips to improve your employee satisfaction.
Of course you want high employee engagement. Who wouldn’t?
High employee engagement correlates with higher revenue growth, net profit margin, customer satisfaction and earnings per share.
Furthermore, engaged employees thrive and feel they get use of their talents. They will stay in a company much longer than disengaged employees, and 87 % won’t leave within their first 12 months of employment.
The potentials of high employee engagement are easy to recognize.
But what if the employee engagement survey do not show the results you truly wanted?
Use these five tips to increase employee engagement
1. Great pre- and onboarding
Pre- and onboarding are great processes to increase employee engagement - if you do it right. Preboarding starts when the deal is sealed and stops the first day of employment, where onboarding takes over. It is all about the new employees, to make them comfortable in their new role, and to get them smoothly in to the daily work tasks as well as the company culture. As a bonus, pre – and onboarding reduces time-to-performance, which benefits your company’s bottom line as well as high employee engagement.
2. Transparency
Don’t hide the bad in your company. The management and the CEO should tell about both the good and bad – and be constructive in their approach. They have to tell about what to do to turn things around. That is inspirational, and it makes employees feeling involved. It seeds enthusiasm and can create a new commitment to the work. If management are transparent and hands out a plan for the employees to help, they can easily respond with a renewed dedication and effort to help your business. It increases employee engagement, and it creates a sense of belonging and meaning for your employees.
3. Learning & Development
Employees want to grow and develop their skills. In fact, 94 percent tells that they would stay in a job if the company invested in their development. But it is not enough just to hand out a course catalogue and let the employees choose for themselves. The development has to make sense in relation to the specific employee role, and how she can grow together with the company. That roots a stronger feeling of meaning for the employee, who is better suited to reach her own and the company’s goals.
4. The Right Tools & Processes
Silos, bureaucracy, and inefficient work environments. There are plenty of barriers for people to get things done. Break down the walls and give your employee the right tools to do his work tasks. It could be software for creating outstanding visuals or a simple SD disc for the employee to save and backup his important work. Clean up in the bad project management as well, and see where you can optimize for employees to move smoother and quicker through their workday. Engaged employees want to move quickly to be effective. They want to do their work properly, and they certainly don’t want to sit and wait to get things done.
5. Feedback & Attention
If you know your individual employee’s strong skills, you can easily improve employee engagement by matching employees with what they are most comfortable doing. What is motivational for each team member? That is the question to ask to fit everyone in to the right role. Check in often and create a clear career path. If your employees know how they can contribute to the company’s mission and vision – it will make their work more meaningful.
But keep in mind that this step is essential too, if you don’t want to risk that your employees burn out. Employees can be engaged but exhausted as well, because they are so passionate about their job, that they might take on a too heavy workload. To make sure that your employees are optimally engaged you need to give them high resources such as supervisor support, rewards and recognition, self-efficacy at work, and low demands such as low workload and low cumbersome bureaucracy (see step 4).