An engaged employee is more focused, conscious, productive, and committed towards the organization. Therefore, employee engagement is important for all organizations irrespective of the size, industry, or growth stage. Disengaged employees not only spoil the team performance but become a huge burden. All organizations that are willing to survive today’s cut-throat competition should work towards improving employee engagement.
Below down, we have listed 6 proven strategies to increase employee engagement!
1. Provide Feedback to Employees – How does anybody know if they are great, mediocre, or a disaster at their job? Everybody assumes they are doing great.
If everybody is doing great, then why do we have terms like good hire and bad hire, right? One will get to know if he is doing good or bad only through the feedbacks.
If there is a dip in the performance of an employee, what are the options you have? Yell at him? Ask him to stretch for extra hours? Or give them pink slip in the worst case, right?
Clearly, this is not the best option. A better option would be to clearly communicate the feedback to the employee. Tell him the areas in which he is strong along with the areas in which he needs to improve.
Most of the people change immediately if they get clear feedback about them.
2. Provide Coaching to Employees – One of the best ways to keep the employees focused and attentive towards their job is to provide training & coaching to them before you put them into a new process or task.
Provide coaching in technical processes, soft skill development, time management, etc. Train your employees in the latest emerging technologies. This keeps the employees curious and the urge to learn more keeps them alert all the time.
Provide cross-training to your employees. It is the process of training the employees in different verticals of the organization’s work. This helps the employees to understand how different teams of the same organization work. This also helps them in collaborating with different teams.
3. Provide the Right Tools – You can’t ask someone to hit the nail with their head, you need to provide a hammer to them. You can’t expect your employees to create wonders by using out-dated tools. Provide the right tools to your employees to improve the results. If you can’t afford paid tools, try searching for some free tools and provide those to your employees.
Tools may be categorized as physical hardware tools and software tools. Both are very important. Equip your employees with the tools that ease up their work or save their time.
Ask them if they have proper hardware tools. Imagine if you have to use the mouse the whole day in your office but your mouse is jumpy. Irritating right?
Proper tools always improve efficiency, so provide your employees with the right tools. E.g. if you give your employees an app that automatically calculates income tax for them, they will really appreciate it.
4. Listen to your Employees – It is very important to listen to your employees. Don’t judge anyone by hearing what someone else is saying. Assuming about someone and judging them is never good.
Give an opportunity to your employees to speak. Make them feel that you care for them. By letting your employees speak, you build a rapport with them. Letting your employees speak builds a great sense of responsibility in their mind as they know that they have to justify eventually.
Also, there are some great ideas in the mind of every individual and those ideas start to fade if you are not letting them speak. So, listen to all the positive and negative things the employee shares with you. Ask for any improvements that can be made in the process.
5. Do Not Squeeze Employees for Results – All the companies need results. Ultimately, results or growth is the reason why the company is paying salaries to its employees. But can you squeeze your employees to increase productivity?
Squeezing for results is going to hurt the employees mentally and you can never get the best out of them. There are a lot of other ways to increase productivity rather than squeezing your employees.
Give them more flexibility in working, know their strengths and weaknesses, plan for some team outings and team building activities. You could also work with payroll service providers who could create compensation plans to help your employees save income tax and take home more salary. This would surely motivate them.
You don’t have to be a wizard to improve productivity. Just try to understand your employees, provide them what they need and you will see the results for sure.
6. Appreciate, Admire, and Applaud – Do not let all the good work and the efforts put by your employees go unnoticed. Appreciate them for every single good thing they are doing for the company. Show them that you respect their efforts. Applaud them for their hard work and the efforts, irrespective of the results.
Focused and committed employees are the biggest asset for any company and your business will definitely grow if you start working towards employee engagement. It is not a tough task and all you need to do is to start showing empathy towards your employees.