Strategies for Encouraging Employee Engagement
While every organization is unique, here are a few suggestions about what you can do, as an employer, to ensure that you are providing a good working environment for your team.
1. Hire and Retain the Right People
In today’s tight labour market, you still need to commit to finding the right person for the job and organization, rather than just a person. You need to ensure that they understand the company and the expectations for the role and that they have the requisite skills required to be successful. Then – it is important that you provide them with a good orientation and on-boarding so that they can be successful. Some organizations provide a buddy system so that the new employee can be fully socialized to the work and team. It is important to check in with your employees on a regular basis. Leadership is vital throughout the employment relationship and you need to ensure that you provide feedback and recognition – while dealing with any performance shortfalls in a respectful and open manner.
2. Communications
Most people want to understand the context of their work. Company meetings can provide information on the strategy, financial results, and challenges and will help to keep your employees focused on what is important to the leadership team. Department and project meetings or standups are also important for people to understand the impact of their work on others, and how the pieces are going to come together to a successful conclusion. Shift meetings can provide current projects or priorities and ensure people are able to provide the appropriate service. It is important to remember that meetings should be respectful of everyone’s time and contributions.
3. Technology
You need to ensure that your employees have the requisite tools to do the job. If you have an antiquated program or equipment that they continually need to “work around”, this can create a level of frustration and tension which will take their mind and energy away from the things that are important for the organization. This can be a challenge as technology is changing rapidly, but it is something that you cannot ignore. Within your company, if you have people working in a different location, or you provide them the opportunity to work remotely – ensure that you have the systems in place for meeting through programs like skype, zoom or conference call functionality.
4. Interesting work and collaboration
It is great to provide people with interesting work that challenges what they know and how to do things. If you are able to foster cross-functional teams so they can learn from each other, this will help to provide new learning – and probably a better result than one person could do on their own. Empowering staff to come up with a solution and challenge the status quo will help to reinforce the knowledge that their contribution and efforts are making a difference to the organization on a larger scale.
5. Organizational Policies
How you do things can be almost as important as what you do. As an organization, how committed are you to the individual needs of your staff? If you know that many on your team are unhappy with your benefit program – are there things that you can do to make this more tailored to their needs? Perhaps you could adjust your sick time policy to cover personal time, time off to take care of a child who is sick – or if someone just needs a mental health day? Are you able to support employee learning (either externally in a post-secondary setting or internally with an opportunity for a lateral move or promotion). How frequently do people receive recognition for a job well done, or feedback on how to do it better next time?
There are many ways that you can enhance the working environment for your staff. It all starts with understanding what they are looking for – and then doing what you can to provide a great environment where they want to remain!