With demographic shifts and a new crop of workers entering the workforce, more and more companies are looking into the importance of fostering employee engagement. They understand that engaged employees are more efficient, facilitate communication between them, lower, and upper management, and are less likely to look for work elsewhere or miss work days. But not everybody understands how to increase engagement. They end up with employees who have no true connection with the company and don’t put in the level of effort they should. In this article, we’re going to give you a few actionable ways that you can improve employee engagement in the workplace.
Set Up a Mentoring Program
Implementing a structured mentoring program can be a great way to show you care about your employees and are happy to help them grow. A mentor will give them a chance to express their grievances, look at ways where they can improve, and find a sense of purpose in their work. Mentored employees are also better trained for the job and have higher job satisfaction.
However, to reap these benefits, your mentoring must be tailor-made for your employees. Groups like Menttium can help you set up customizable programs made with your company’s and employees’ needs in mind. They can also help create cross-company mentoring programs that will allow your employees to gain expertise from outside companies and different industries and apply it to their day to day functions.
Make Engagement a Central Part of your Business Strategy
If you’re really serious about employee engagement, this shouldn’t be a function that you delegate to your HR department, which could be deprioritized at any time. Engagement should play a central role in your operation, from welcoming programs all the way up to training and continuous improvement.
Use the Proper Tools to Measure Engagement
Engagement is a very abstract concept. You have to find a way to measure it without being too intrusive. One thing you could do is use formal baseline surveys to report and measure engagement metrics.
But gathering the data is not enough. You also have to make sure that managers and leaders actually act on this data and feedback. It will be worse if you constantly take surveys, but never follow up with concrete changes. Doing so could decrease morale, trust, and engagement.
That’s why you must make employee engagement a regular subject in management meetings. This will ensure that the subject is always a priority. Check where you’re doing well, where you’re having issues, and figure out how to correct them.
You should also have clear measurable engagement benchmarks as well. Don’t focus solely on the answers you get from surveys. Look for actual impact on things like employee retention, absenteeism numbers, and customer satisfaction among other things.
Conclusion
A more engaged workforce is more loyal, productive, and satisfied. Make sure that you follow these few simple tips if you want to improve your workforce’s efficiency and sense of purpose.
