4 steps to improve employee engagement

“Employee engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.”1 Employee engagement is neither synonymous with employee happiness nor with employee satisfaction. Happiness and satisfaction are outcomes of engagement.

Engaged employees drive the organization forward. Four dimensions define an engaged employee:

How important is it to keep your employees engaged?

Look at some data before you answer…

• A Glint study revealed that the regrettable attrition rate of disengaged employees is 12 times higher than highly engaged employees over the period of a year.
• According to Gallup, engaged employees outperform disengaged employees by 21 percent.
• A Hay Group study showed that highly engaged employees are 87 percent less likely to leave your company than disengaged employees.
• According to a Temkin Group study, 63% of highly engaged employees always try their hardest at work, compared with 42% of disengaged employees, resulting in better productivity.
• A Shandwick study reports that 33% of engaged employees share positive sentiments or comments about their employers without any encouragement.

Very important…

Having realized how valuable engaged employees are, the most obvious question follows:

How can you improve employee engagement?

You let your employee take home some “wow” moments by understanding them, equipping them with skills, nurturing talent, incentivizing initiative, listening to and acting on their feedback, encouraging teamwork, and rewarding top performers.

To bring down the staggering economic impact of disengaged employees, safeguard your investment, reduce attrition, and enjoy a significant competitive advantage, design an effective engagement strategy.

Find ways to increase team performance if you realize your workforce needs help. People are more satisfied in jobs that match their skills sets. Employees need to believe they are making valuable contributions to the business. They want to be recognized and rewarded for their efforts. But, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy.

Opportunities for personal growth can motivate employees like nothing else.

• Run internal contests to boost employee engagement. Intranet skill-based contests motivate employees to up their performance. Friendly competition, teamwork, and a promise of prizes can be a great draw. Asking for suggestions and acknowledging them to foster an innovative internal culture.

• Internal hackathons and gamified assessments can be the core of your employee engagement plan and can be tracked using employee engagement software. These create a buzz and spark interest.

• Identify talent within the organization using assessment tools and techniques while keeping employees engaged.

• For example, Recruit is a tool used by companies world over, such as Adobe and Wipro, to create internal programming challenges. It helps spot exceptional employees in and find solutions from the current workforce. Also, these coding competitions can build a talent pipeline for the future. Recruit comes with an exhaustive question library with over 18,000 questions in 32 programming languages across 51 major domains and inbuilt plagiarism checker. Any number of employees can take the test simultaneously. Submissions are checked for logical correctness, time efficiency, memory efficiency, and code-size limit; they are auto-evaluated instantaneously. Comprehensive test reports give you a complete picture.

• Tailor training programs for better business outcomes; do a skill gap analysis before you design your L&D agenda.

• Here’s a good read from McKinsey, and then another.

Using relevant, transparent, and fun schemes that are backed by inspiring leadership, effective communication, and incentives can ensure participation and boost morale. As Ian Hutchinson says, “Employee engagement is an investment we make for the privilege of future proofing our organization’s productivity and performance.”

Enable your employees by providing opportunities to showcase or build requisite skills, compete, and grow…

Arpit Mishra Author 49 Blogs