Kellie Wong — March 15, 2020 A strong team is productive, loyal, and dedicated to customer satisfaction. An ideal team makes it their mission to go above and beyond. When everyone’s motivated to do just enough to keep their jobs, how do you motivate workers to continue to learn and grow? By understanding the factors that affect employee engagement you can motivate your workforce.
Fully engaged employees have been shown to be 21 percent more profitable. Address employee disengagement in the workplace can help your business’s bottom line and overall success. Here are some of the biggest employee engagement success factors, and how to make improvements that raise both motivation and productivity.
Employee engagement success factors to cultivate
Employee engagement boils down to the quality of your company’s relationship with its people. Do you show workers appreciation? Do you give social rewards in addition to monetary ones? Do employees feel comfortable and empowered to speak their minds, share good ideas, and encourage coworkers?
These details go far in making employees feel like they’re doing more than “just” a job. It makes them feel they are stakeholders in your business—active participants doing meaningful work. When this happens, employees will feel a deep connection to their organization, and they will care about success as much as you do.
Here are some of the major factors that affect employee engagement and how to improve them.
1. Company culture
What’s the overall emotional climate of your organization, and how do people feel in general? Is the workforce relaxed, friendly, and smiling? Or is it tense, closed-mouthed, and alienated? Assess the general morale, perhaps supplemented by a survey asking employees to detail their feelings about the company culture, and then find ways to improve it.
Your culture is made up of values and behaviors. Make engagement itself a value and encourage engagement as a behavior. Seek to increase collaboration as much as possible and support making social connections.
Explain your company’s overall mission and tell every employee how their individual work helps to further that mission. This gives your team a sense of purpose and belonging, which are important for a strong culture of engagement.
Finally, include everyone—even those in entry-level or junior roles. Employees who feel excluded from company culture will demonstrate poor productivity and underperformance.
2. Employee participation
Never view employees as cogs in a wheel, thoughtless drones content to do repetitive tasks. Everyone has ideas and encouraging employees to share their thoughts has benefits: you not only show that you value their intellectual capabilities, but you might get some useful information, as well. After all, who has more insight into the work your company does than the people doing that work every day?
Give employees a platform where they can easily share their ideas with all levels of the organization. Allow people to have open conversations about work, education, or even on social topics. Because even conversations that aren’t directly about how to work better can strengthen social ties and cohesion. You may receive critical feedback, and if this is the case, don’t panic. Show your ability to take difficult feedback into consideration and your team will respect you all the more.
Finally, encourage employees to recognize each other’s accomplishments. Not only does it spread warm, fuzzy feelings between coworkers, it makes people feel they are empowered to give praise. The more you allow and encourage people to express themselves, the more they will feel valued and engaged.
3. Good management
The majority of employees interact with their managers and supervisors on a regular basis. These leadership positions are one of the main ways that the employee-organization relationship is expressed and experienced by most people. So, choose the right managers.
Your managers should be motivated by a desire to help employees expand and reach their full potential. They must have detailed knowledge about your industry and the roles they oversee in order to make wise decisions.
Employees need managers they can respect: competent, smart leaders who aren’t in it for the sake of their own egos. You need to coach your management team on engagement strategies, ensuring they watch employee progress while constantly giving feedback and emotional engagement.
In many ways, managers are the face of your company. Be careful who you choose to represent you, as the wrong person can do irreparable damage to the employee-organization relationship.
4. Frequent recognition
Of all the steps we’ve discussed, employee recognition could be considered the most important.
Without the work employees do every day, your company couldn’t exist. Make sure to express this! It’s especially important that managers and leaders give recognition, as it’s proven to be a powerful form of reinforcement. Recognition should be frequent, as 85 percent of employees who were recognized weekly said they felt satisfied, and 75 percent of employees who were recognized by management at least once a month reported high levels of job satisfaction. And yet, most employees do not receive recognition from management frequently enough.
The data is clear: With 46 percent of employees feeling only “moderately” valued by supervisors and 30 percent feeling “not very” or “not at all” valued by supervisors, a little recognition goes a long way. It makes people want to work harder and can solve a lot of your pain points, including high turnover, low morale, or a poor company culture. Make it a priority to recognize your employees on a frequent basis and make the act of recognizing a social activity everyone in the company can get involved in. Recognition is the leading driver of employee engagement; don’t lose sight of this massive opportunity to improve your business and employee experience through recognition.
Make employee engagement success factors work for you
If your firm struggles with any of these employee engagement success factors, get help.
Engagement can turn uninspired employees into the motivated workforce of your dreams. To turnover and absenteeism while raising productivity by improving your firm’s relationship with its people. To learn more, request a demo online.
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