Five simple strategies to improve employee engagement

Most organisations are now analysing their 2018 performance and mapping out strategies to enhance growth in the new year.

An often underrated part of a firm’s upward trajectory is their employees’ engagement within the organisation.

Simply defined, employee engagement is an employee’s emotional commitment to what your company wants to achieve - its goals and mission.

An engaged employee is willing to put in extra effort, like working into the night to go above and beyond for a client, to make a difference for the company.

They are enthusiastic about their job and are dedicated to their day-to-day activities because they understand how their work fits into the overall mission of the company. They believe in the overall mission of the company.

Employee engagement differs from employee satisfaction - the measure of how happy and satisfied an employee is at work - in a few key ways.

In particular, while satisfied employees enjoy coming to work every day, engaged employees will be genuinely interested in improving your company’s products and services, and bring the energy to promote innovative thinking.

So, what can you do to inspire this emotional commitment and achieve employee engagement in your company?

Decision-making

Key tips to improve employee engagement include promoting a learning culture, a positive work environment, empowered decision-making, career advancement, incentives, and performance reviews.

Do your employees feel you have an interest in their career growth and personal development beyond just a focus on profit-making for the organisation? 

There are many ways to promote a learning culture - from training in areas that will help your employees grow and develop (such as training on giving and receiving feedback), mentorship programmes where younger employees can benefit from more tenured team members to giving employees opportunities to try new things and learn on the job.

One idea from a client is inviting outside speakers to lecture on a topic that is interesting for their team.

Positive work environment. Is your office the kind of place your employees look forward to being each day?

Is it comfortable? Is it accessible to eliminate the hassle of getting to work, or do you have flexible hours to account for different commutes and family obligations?

Giving your employees autonomy about how they structure their work and approach projects promotes ownership, job satisfaction, and engagement.