What Good Employee Engagement Looks Like
Businesses thrive when employees are invested in the goals of their organization and care about the results. You may suffer from “burnout” with your more long-term employees. Or, you may have new employees that don’t take you seriously enough.
Both types of employees may need a little boost to improve morale. So how do you make them care about what your business does?
- Make your mission clear.
- Talk to your employees.
- See how their needs match with your organization’s needs.
Most employees want to do their very best work. But sometimes, life gets in the way and they lose focus. Remind them that their work is important and show that you appreciate them. Pizza parties are an excellent way to show appreciation in a more casual office.
If you track performance and expect people to meet quotas, make it a competition with a reward for the person who does the best work. Don’t make it about putting down your less productive employees. Focus on lifting them up and finding ways to help them be better at their jobs.
People are more invested in their careers when they have a mission. If they don’t see the results of all their hard work, they can be discouraged and stop caring. Make sure they can see the results your company gets because of their input.
For instance, a call center might collect data for engagement survey question examples. Decision makers use this information to create policies and regulations that give the maximum benefit to everyone involved. Without this valuable input, the organizations that sponsor your research won’t be able to do their jobs properly.
Let your employees see the entire process. How their work affects the work of others and fits an overall mission and purpose to make lives better.
Get to know your employees. Personnel files will help, but try talking to them and getting to know what they’re like.
- What school did they go to?
- What are they passionate about?
- What was their main reason for deciding to work for your organization from the very beginning?
When your goals meet their goals, employees care about results and engage in their very best work and efforts. Recent studies suggested that companies with engaged employees report a 23% higher profit than those with disengaged workers.
What happens when employees have been with you a long time and don’t feel appreciated? Maybe they feel that their suggestions have been ignored, or other people hired after they were promoted ahead of them? It’s easy to get discouraged when your work has been overlooked and taken for granted.
Respect “institutional knowledge” and the feedback from your long-timers. Institutional knowledge comes from experience and the ability to see the big picture as it unfolds throughout the years. Long-term employees can be a valuable source of information about the history of your business and what kind of challenges it experienced in the past. Don’t dismiss them right away simply because they haven’t been promoted. Employees who work in the background are just as important.