Employee engagement is more than keeping your staff happy or satisfied, although both are important goals to work for, satisfied or happy staff are not necessarily engaged. Engaged staff have well-defined roles in the organisation making strong contributions, actively connected to their organisation, and are continuously progressing.
An engaged workplace encourages commitment, energy and productivity from all those involved to help improve business performance.
All people managers would like to think that their staff are engaged and involved in the business and that they feel valued although if you ask your employees if this is the case you may be pleasantly surprised that this is indeed not how they feel.
Some benefits of keeping your staff engaged and involved are:
- Employees feel valued and part of a team
- Better decision making can be made
- Moral and motivation is greater in the team
- It frees up your time as a manager to contribute to the department’s success in other areas
Here we share with you some of our tips on how to engage and involve your staff:
Get to know your people
Taking the time to listen and learn about your employees’ interests can help build relationships between employees and managers and can have an important impact on employee engagement and motivation.
Recognise your staff
Recognition from a manager can be a very important motivator for employees and it can encourage positive behaviour and help promote long-term top performance.
Communicating people’s successes by internal communications helps build team spirit, as does running awards that recognise team and individual achievements.
Build a customer-focused team
Today’s best people managers and employees are customer-focused based. They understand and anticipate the needs of both internal and external customers. They meet and exceed customer needs with timely, efficient and economical solutions and by taking the steps to build a customer-focused team this will help improve both employee and customer engagement. Having just returned from a trip to America, the customer service in we received in all shops, restaurants and bars was second to none – we could learn a lot from how they do things over the pond regarding customer service.
Ask your employees to keep a log of ideas to improve customer service and regularly meet with them to discuss their ideas and brainstorm actions. Evaluate ideas by their importance, feasibility and positive impact. Track and measure progress with employees on a consistent basis.
Provide coaching to your people
Being a people manager your role is to support and coach your employees to their highest levels of performance. Coaching your employees so they understand their responsibilities and your expectations will help overall engagement among your employees.
Encourage your employees to measure and track their performance over time, measuring important dimensions of individual and team performance, including those which cannot be easily quantified. Provide coaching on areas which are lagging in performance measurements.
Act on feedback
After team meetings and 1-1s, employees are interested in seeing any suggestions that were discussed put into action, not following through on any employee suggestions can make the employee feel like their opinion was irrelevant and can make them feel unappreciated in the team which can lead to a lack of motivation.
Being involved in every step of the process and communicating the progress and successes to all employees can show that suggestions are being followed through.
Your turn
What do you do to engage and involve your staff?