Use These Tips for Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a buzzword sweeping through human resources departments and managerial circles as companies try to find ways to keep workers interested in their positions for longer periods of time. Statistics show engaged employees work better, stay at their jobs longer and boost a firm's productivity. Use these three tips to try to improve how employees work at your office.

Questions, Questions

Start out by asking the right questions of everyone in the company. You cannot figure out the right employee engagement strategy without getting feedback. Don't ask too many questions — even if you're after valuable data — because workers may not want to fill out 200 questions in one sitting. Determine what your company needs to know the most. Encourage employees to say what's on their minds and talk about what they need without fear of backlash. Ask questions and encourage conversation to get issues out in the open your firm can act accordingly.

Proactive Stances

Have a proactive stance when you consider employee engagement. Companies invest more than $270 million collectively, per year, on trying to figure out what makes workers want to stay with a particular company. Your firm should invest in the right tools to improve engagement. Your company may decide to change its culture to be more family friendly as employees seek a better work-life balance. How your firm achieves this part of the plan is one aspect of the investment your business must make to successfully implement an overall plan.

You may find several challenges that arise with employee engagement, such as supervisors who do not pay attention to employee issues. Being proactive means looking for ways to improve engagement from the entry-level employee all the way up to the CEO. Everyone must be on board for this plan to work properly. Deal with problems as they arise rather than putting them off.

Drivers

After you ask the right questions and determine what problems to solve, you need to know what drives employee engagement at your business. Workers may want a relaxed atmosphere, more meaningful ways to connect with customers, a supportive environment where every worker matters or a set of goals that make a difference in their lives. Employees might want just one thing that can keep them excited about their work, such as opportunities for advancement or incentives to work harder, or you may find workers want a list of items that could retain your best talent for many more years to come. Once you have your answers, implement necessary changes. The investment in employees pays off in the long run, with less time taken off work for sick days, higher productivity and slower turnover rates.

Your culture of engagement involves a continuous loop of feedback, proactively seeking how to improve the way employees work and knowing what makes everyone tick at the office. These three tips help you implement your employee engagement strategy now before you lose your best people to another company that already has a viable plan in place.

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