4 Ways To Boost Employee Engagement To Drive Business Results

“The biggest concern for any organization should be when their most passionate people become quiet.” – Tim McClure

Employees are every organization’s most important asset. Without excellent and outstanding employees, a company has no hope of staying competitive. Keeping and maximizing the potential of employees require more than just competitive salary and benefits. Other factors must be considered not just to keep them but also to hone their potential. This is the reason why employee engagement is important.

To keep your business growing and to increase your profitability, you need to make sure that every one of your employees is engaged and motivated.

High performing companies are aware of this, and as such, employee engagement is one of their top priorities.

Here’s How To Boost Employee Engagement:

1. Provide Growth Opportunities

Boredom and stagnation will cause an employee to be disengaged. Management and HR should be more deliberate in consistently providing training and growth opportunities.

By providing growth opportunities, you give employees a goal to aspire for, thereby giving them incentive to improve the quality of their work as well as motivate them to seek ways to advance their knowledge and skill sets. In addition, a coaching relationship prevents your employees from being stagnant, bored, and apathetic. 

2. Provide Feedback

When individual performance, motivation, and work ethics of employees directly influence their team and the organization, it is crucial to consistently evaluate every employee and provide feedback.

Monitoring employee performance allows you to provide both positive feedback and constructive criticism to make sure your people are constantly aware of their strengths as well as the areas where they can still improve on.

This is one of the ways a good way a company can indirectly communicate how it values its employees, which results in engaged and motivated employees.

Previous survey results indicate ‘professional development’ is one of the most important benefits for employees. After all, no one wants to stay the same as they are 2 years ago. No one enjoys doing the same things they have been doing for more than a year. If you have a lot of employees who are not actively pursuing growth and development, you may not be hiring the best candidates. 

It is also advised that organizations implement a system where best performers are accorded proper recognition as well given appropriate pay increases and benefits. Doing this will make well performing employees feel that their efforts are recognized and appreciated.

Combine this with training and coaching, you will be a step ahead towards maintaining a competitive workforce.

3. Challenge Employees

If you are hiring highly competent candidates, they will naturally respond well to challenge and competition. The opposite is also true, leave them bored, unchallenged, and underutilized and they will start considering other career opportunities.

There are several ways to challenge employees.

• A manager can set yearly or monthly goals or assign new responsibilities.

They key is to listen to employees during performance evaluations

• If an employee shows interest in developing or learning a certain skill, the HR or manager should encourage them to do so.

Keep in mind, that this will require you to handle failures. In learning and growth, failure is almost always a part of it. How the manager or the HR responds an employees failure is crucial to maintaining employee morale

• When challenging employees, you should always communicate that you got their back, and live up to your word should failure comes.

4. Give Employees A Proper Onboarding

While this is a standard procedure for most companies, not every organization is doing it right. The most effective onboarding programs last for weeks, not just a day.

Your onboarding process should not just be about mechanically discussing company values and mission/vision statements. Instead, you should be focusing on investing time and effort to make sure the new hires can adjust as quickly as possible. The HR and the management should be proactive in supporting new hires to be productive and successful in their new role in the company.

Hiring employees, onboarding them for a day, then leaving them be while expecting them to produce quality outputs may not be fair for new hires. Just doing this will not make them feel engaged with the company and its goals.

You should start investing in your onboarding program if you haven’t done so already. Make sure new employees can feel welcome and get aligned with your company values. Create a roadmap to help them integrate themselves into the company, and provide the right training and guidance so they can hit the ground running on their first day.

High-performing organizations treat employee engagement as a business objective. Investing in strategic HR activities that boost employee engagement is one of the ways to maintain a competitive workforce. Keep your employees engaged with the intention of creating a win-win scenario for both employees and the company. This is possible since engaged employees are more dedicated and passionate for their work, and the company will grow and increase its profitability as a result.