Employee Engagement: How can you Measure and Increase it?
Employee engagement is a metric to measure how motivated and involved your employees are in their roles in your company. Importantly, it does not reflect only on how passionate your workforce is. It also depicts how much you invest in them. High employee engagement indicates that you put in considerable effort in keeping people positive about their jobs.
In the present economy, it has become even more crucial to be mindful of this metric. If an employee does not find their workplace motivating, they are likely to seek opportunities elsewhere. A poor sense of belonging also affects the quality of work produced. It can be damaging to the reputation of your business and create dissonance among your customers.
Types of Employee Engagement in a Workplace
Usually, there are three kinds of employees in any workplace:
- Engaged: Business leaders are the happiest with these employees! They are committed to their jobs and eager to assume more responsibilities. Typically, such employees take leadership roles in the organization and are unlikely to switch companies.
- Disengaged: It is the polar opposite of an engaged employee. Such people tend to spread negativity at work. Their level of non-commitment to their roles is so high that they create a miserable environment for others.
- Not Engaged: It is not the same as a disengaged employee. Such workers are not necessarily unhappy at work. But their connection with the company vision is missing.
Effective Strategies for Employee Engagement
The prime goal of the following engagement strategies is to convert employees who are not actively engaged. They also bode well with They also bode well with already committed staffers.
- Timely Paystubs, Rewards & Bonuses
It is elementary human psychology: being rewarded for a job well done feels excellent. Timely payments, overtime pay, vacation packages, and rewards at the workplace are effective ways of improving employee morale and engagement. When you implement a reward system, it encourages your employees to start working harder towards organizational goals. It assures them that perseverance will not go unnoticed.
The rewards can be simple, like a gift card or a certificate. You could also hand out a heftier bonus. Pay hikes are vital to keeping employees happy. A meatier paystub can do wonders to up the retention rates of your company! If you don’t already hand out periodic checkstubs to your employees, you can use an online paystub generator like StubCheck.com. It works out well even for small businesses since the background calculator does all the work. You get saved the time/effort investment of separate payroll management.
- Respect in the Workplace
It is less a strategy and more an imperative in any office. In the absence of a respectful work environment, your workforce will feel slighted, offended, and less motivated to put in its best. From managers and supervisors to minimum-wage staff, every employee deserves respect. You may need to establish a grievance management system and up your vigilance to ascertain that none of your employees is being harassed, insulted, or treated unfairly.
- Team Building Activities
It is a popular employee engagement strategy with which many modern companies are now experimenting. You can plan team building sessions for your staff during which all the employees get a chance to bond and spend quality time together. You can choose an offsite location to make the event memorable. The idea is to make such sessions fun and interactive, not monotonous and flooded with interminable meetings. Some businesses organize such events for small groups to give the employees a better chance to connect. Happier, more connected people are likelier to want to remain in your office!
- Feedback Loop
Setting up a feedback mechanism within your company is an effective way to increase employee engagement. Everyone wants to feel valued and heard, especially your staff that invests time and effort every workday. Giving them a portal to share their recommendations, concerns, ideas, etc., will go a long way in making your employees feel connected to the core values of your business.
A few simple ways of implementing a feedback system are surveys, questionnaires, one-on-one interviews, and team brainstorming sessions. Basic steps like letting your employees access their paystub online and get errors rectified swiftly can enhance how your staff feels about your office.
- Growth Opportunities
Ask any employee in an exit interview why they are quitting their present job, and the likeliest answer is lack of opportunities for career growth. Many businesses suffer from the problem of few career progression opportunities. An intelligent engagement strategy is to boost internal hiring. You can also have discussions about growth trajectories with your employees, especially during appraisals and review meetings.
Measuring Employee Engagement
The best way to measure the levels of engagement is to establish pointers that connect employees to their roles. Typically, an engaged employee produces high-quality work, has a good understanding of the core values of your business, and is eager to explore new responsibilities. To check these pointers, you can conduct employee engagement surveys (pulse surveys), one-on-one meetings, exit interviews, and team discussions. Some employers also use “stay” interviews where they ask employees what their driving forces are. It is best to measure frequently – monthly or quarterly – although many companies do it at the beginning or end of the fiscal year.
Low employee engagement is a common problem in many organizational setups. It is easy to get complacent if your business seems to be going well and you are absorbed in day-to-day operations. But considering how detrimental this situation is, it is best to commence upping employee engagement right away!