Rick Goodman — January 13, 2020 The best employee engagement strategies are crucial to your business success moving forward, I don’t’ believe that there is a one-size-fits-all approach. In this podcast I will share with you the best employee engagement strategies for 2020.
In fact, I’d urge skepticism regarding most cookie-cutter approaches to retaining high levels of employee engagement. The fact is that all companies are different, and it’s important to choose your employee engagement strategies based on culture, company size, goals, etc.
There are a few principals that if implemented will surely bring you success because they are employee engagement strategies that work well across all different types of organizations. I’m not saying these are completely foolproof, but if you execute them properly, I think you’ll see your employee engagement numbers start moving in the right direction. Also, these principles can lay a firm foundation for more stronger and more advanced employee engagement effort in the future.
The 5 Best Employee Engagement Strategies for 2020
Give your employees a roadmap that will ensure their success.
Most people on planet earth prefer to have some sense of where their lives and their careers are headed. Your employees are no different. Younger employees are especially eager to have some sense of what’s coming down the road; they want to know if they have a real future within your organization or need to plan a career trajectory that involves a few employer changeups.
The best things you can do to facilitate employee engagement is provide your team members with positive feedback that they have a real future with your business with chances to grow new skills and have more responsibility. This can be as simple as holding regular career discussions with your employees, asking them where they see themselves in the years to come and providing them with some ways in which they can position themselves for advancement within your enterprise.
Always acknowledge and praise good work.
People like to have their efforts and accomplishments recognized.
It may seem like a small thing to highlight your team members’ achievements or to celebrate their successes… but actually, it’s no small thing at all for hard-working professionals to receive accolades from their upper management.
Statistics consistently show that most employees worry their efforts go unnoticed; and when employees feel like their hard work is never appreciated, they quickly lose their motivation to do anything but the bare minimum. I even believe some employees are just doing time until the next opportunity.
One of the most effective employee engagement strategies you can muster is to provide a few simple words of recognition when the situation calls for it.
Keep open lines of communication and even an open-door policy
Ensuring consistent, two-way communication between managers and employees is vital to a good employee engagement program.
All leaders should be proactive in sharing news and updates with team members. Nobody likes to be left in the dark, so make sure your employees have a good sense of where the company is headed, how things are going, what big projects are coming down the pipeline, etc. Dispensing such information on a “need to know” basis only can cause your team members to feel like you don’t really trust or value them.
Also, make sure you have channels in place for employees to present their questions, concerns, or suggestions, without fear of any kind of retaliation. It’s important to have an open-door policy, but you should go a step further and make sure employees know that their comments and feedback will be truly received by a leader or manager and treated with due seriousness.
For your organizational culture to thrive, it’s critical that you provide consistent two-way communication.
Give team members a sense of purpose and instill pride in their work.
Don’t assume that your team members are content to simply show up each day, do some grunt work, and collect a paycheck.
This may be true of some employees, but many of them want to do work that actually makes a difference. This is especially true of younger employees. They want to know that what they do matters.
Understanding that this is a powerful and motivational tool it can be helpful to provide a clear set of business values and principles, and to show each team member how their daily efforts connect to those values and principles. Make sure your employees know the mission of your organization and feel like they’re helping to further it.
Be fair with everyone.
Sometimes the best strategies are the simplest of all to implement. I’ll offer a simple yet seismic suggestion: Treat your employees with fairness.
What do I mean by this? For one, it’s critical that employees feel like they are being judged on the basis of the effort they put in, not external factors that are outside their control.
Also, it’s important that leaders and managers hold themselves to the same standard (perhaps even a higher standard) as their employees.
Be sure that your team members consistently feel like they’re getting a fair shake; that so long as they work and behave to a specified standard, they will be rewarded in kind.
Questions About Employee Engagement Strategies?
These are some vital principles that I think will serve your organization well, and that translate pretty well from one business setting to the next.
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