Here are eight easy-to-implement tips that will help you encourage engagement in your employees as your push toward reaching your 2016 business goals.
1. Give your employees tasks they can feel proud of. While everyone has day-to-day work assignments that must be done, it is incredibly important to provide employees with meaningful work. Perhaps an assistant can run the Earth Day celebration or a customer service rep can be challenged to make one customer laugh every day.
2. Help people understand why their job matters. It is easy for a salesperson or production manager to understand why he or she matters. It may be harder for a receptionist or administrative assistant to feel valuable. One great way to make sure each employee understands their value is to create a job description that includes why they are necessary for your company to function.
3. Promote a common purpose. By working at your company, every employee is a member of your team. Foster this by creating a common purpose that the entire company can get behind.
4. Create a system for reconciliation.Employees won’t feel safe or motivated if they can be treated unfairly. Create a reporting system that allows each employee to tell HR if someone has treated them in an unfair or unbecoming manner. Additionally, allow employees to report violations of work policy. Some reports may require simple correction or retraining on a policy, while others may need HR intervention. Having a reporting system lets employees know they do not have to navigate issues on their own. They can report what they know and return their attention to their own work, confident there is someone listening who has the authority and know-how to take care of it.
5. Provide employee training opportunities to all employees. Many companies train their sales, marketing, and management teams while leaving other valuable employees to their own devices. Make sure to offer training opportunities throughout the year that can help every employee. This may include bringing in outside speakers for a seminar or allowing a junior person to accompany a more senior employee to a convention. Every employee should want to better him- or herself so that they can improve their quality of work, and even try for a promotion.
6. Lead by example. As business leaders, we often want employees to believe in our vision. However, if we demonstrate to our team through our own work ethic or actions that the stated goal is unimportant in some way, staff engagement will decline. Foster employee engagement by demonstrating your own engagement in your stated goals.
7. Let the games begin! One way to get your employees really engaged in their work is to create a game in which they can participate. This can be anything from “If your team reaches 100 sales in an hour, lunch is on me” to “If your customer service score goes up by 10 percent on average this quarter, you can have an extra vacation day.”
A quick additional tip here is to find out what is really valuable to your employees. Some may say money while others may want to be able to leave early for a couple of days or to be able to work from home. By offering valuable rewards for commensurate production at work, your employees will become very motivated to succeed.
8. Reward your whole team. Set major company-wide goals and inform the entire company what they will all get if those goals are achieved. For example, if each department 5x’s its production this quarter, you will host a company-wide family picnic. Something each individual will respond to personally, as well as within their departmental team. Take care to ensure the game does not end up penalizing stellar producers or rewarding lazy ones riding on their coat tails, which will torpedo all future attempts at increasing engagement! When setting up a company-wide game, put care and attention into the rules to ensure everyone can win, and those who really carried the load can be appropriately seen and acknowledged.
Employee engagement is incredibly important. By creating employee engagement activities, your employee retention rate will increase and your team will consistently reach your company goals.
Do you need help with employee retention or with formulating company-wide goals? Contact us today for an initial evaluation and consult!
