How to Improve Employee Engagement
The best way to be effective as a leader of people is to know the team working for you and around you. Engaging with your employees will help raise their standards and effectiveness. Employee engagement can be the difference between a successful manager and one who flounders, here are a few tips on how to utilise employee engagement to the benefit of your company and management style.
Ask For Employee Feedback in the Right Way – The worst thing you can do is to make your employees feel like management does not listen them to. Asking them for feedback on certain aspects of your work could be crucial to the development of a program or a technique that you have been trialling but ensure that you ask specific questions that you do plan on addressing. If you ask questions that gleans data and information that you don’t plan on using, your staff might feel like you were never going to act on anything they’ve advised in the first place and disengage as a result.
Have a Clear Goal and Implement it Locally – Your employee engagement must run right through the company. So the owner and CEO of a company must have an idea in place of how the entire organisation runs employee feedback and at each stage there must be a consistent approach to this, from top to bottom. For those conducting the feedback at each stage they must feel like they have the power to act on the data they receive in order to continuously evolve and improve upon the company processes and have a happy workforce as a result.
Have The Right Managers in Place – The best managers are those that have empathy for their colleagues and the team working for them. They’ll understand the hard work that is put in and be there to offer advice guidance and a safe place for employee feedback, even at times when it isn’t an official time to do so. They’ll know the strengths and weaknesses of the team and act decisively to support the team reach their goals.
Hold Managers Accountable for Employee Engagement – As part of your management training programme, include the key points of employee engagement and ensure your managers understand their role and responsibilities. If they know they are responsible for conducting engagement surveys and acting upon them, they are more likely to be effective at improving the standards within their team.
Have a Clear Defined Goal for Engagement – It takes a whole for the culture of a business to fully embrace employee engagement but you can start to thread it into everyday work processes to make the whole team understand it in the long run and feel comfortable in doing so. Make sure there are defined goals and parameters for employee engagement, talk about it in management meetings, tea meetings and one-on-one sessions with staff members.
Employee engagement could be the next step your business requires in order to take that next jump in productivity and effectiveness as a result of staff contentment in the role.
