5 Powerful Ways to Raise Employee Engagement in Your Company

To succeed in today’s competitive environment, companies rely on the engagement and commitment of their employees. When they perform their assigned roles well, organizations fulfill their objectives and raise enough revenue to stay afloat.

But sometimes, employees are not motivated enough to perform their duties. This can be caused by many issues such as employees not having the right tools to perform their jobs or a poor company culture that makes employees feel neglected.

This should worry you as an employer because it could see you lose your best workers. To prevent this from happening, you need to find ways to raise employee engagement in your organization.

In this post, I’ll share five strategies you can use to make your employees engaged and committed to their work.

What is Employee Engagement?

Before I share the strategies you can use to raise employee engagement, let’s first understand what employee engagement is.

It’s a workplace concept that describes how dedicated and enthusiastic employees are toward their job. It also indicates how committed an employee is to the organization and their emotional connection to the people they work with.

High levels of employee engagement are often key to the success of a company. This is because engaged employees care about the performance of the company and would do what it takes to see it succeed. And that’s why you must pay attention to the experience you create for your employees by using the right set of employee experience tools.

Successful organizations are always looking to raise employee engagement to enjoy the benefits of a motivated workforce such as:

• Increased employee productivity

• More revenue

• Better customer experience

• Higher employee retention

• Lower absenteeism

  While that’s the case, the situation on the ground paints a completely different picture. According to Gallup's Global Workplace report, only 21% of employees feel engaged in their workplace.

The study also found that only 33% of employees are thriving in their overall well-being.

Source: Gallup

These stats indicate that there’s a lot that organizations need to do to motivate their employees.

Tips to Improve Employee Engagement

Now that you know what employee engagement is all about and why it’s important for your business, let’s take a look at some of the strategies you can implement to improve it.

Below are 5 tips to raise employee engagement in your workplace.

#1. Provide the Right Tools

One of the most powerful ways to raise employee engagement is to ensure workers have all the tools they need to perform their jobs well. It can be so frustrating trying to accomplish a task without the right tools

It will take longer to do the job and harder to achieve the desired results. This will lead to frustration and make the employee miserable.

That’s why it’s important to ensure employees have all the tools required to succeed in their jobs. For example, the accountants in your small organization need the best accounting software to do their job effectively. Take a look at this Zoho Books review to see if it’s the right accounting tool for your company.

#2. Improve Communication in the Organization

One of the crucial things to bear in mind if you want to raise employee engagement within an organization is communication.

Communication is integral to the success of an organization. It determines how colleagues engage with each other and fulfill their tasks.

However, many organizations still experience miscommunication between employees. This is probably because they still use outdated and inefficient channels to exchange information.

This harms employee productivity since workers struggle to get the help they need to accomplish their tasks. It can also make them feel disconnected from their teams.

To raise employee engagement, organizations need to improve their workforce communication methods. Also, it helps to control business spending and reduce your business operation cost.

For instance, if you have a hybrid or remote team, it helps to use an internal communications tool like Slack to help your employees collaborate, irrespective of their time zones.

Source: Slack

#3. Recognize Employees

Recognizing your workers goes a long way in making them feel valued and increasing their productivity.

Rewards and recognition increase the motivation of employees and make them feel inspired to do their work.

Ask them to promote your company using the right employee advocacy software to curate and share the right content about your organization on their social media accounts.

So, if you haven’t been doing it, you need to incorporate employee recognition into your workplace management strategy to raise employee engagement.

Some effective ways to do that include:

• Recognize your workers for their achievements at the workplace. Take notice when a worker does something commendable and appreciate them for the good work.

• Celebrate work anniversaries of your employees as a way to appreciate them for staying loyal to your organization.

• Celebrate personal milestones like birthdays. A simple cake on an employee’s birthday will make them feel special.

• As you can see, none of these measures are costly. Such simple measures will help you create a positive work environment, which, in turn, will boost employee morale and improve employee well-being.

To make the recognition process even better, you could consider incorporating gamification into it. You could leverage employee engagement solutions that enable team members to reward their colleagues for their achievements. These rewards could add up to level upgrades or points collected, which they could then redeem for real gifts.

It’s a great way to recognize the employees and make them feel valued.

#4. Invest in Your Workers

Another measure you can implement to raise employee engagement is to provide relevant coaching and training to your workers. Employees want to be supported to perform their jobs effectively, and organizations can do that by providing them with relevant training or study materials like this hub on SEO.

Of course, job-specific training is expensive, but what organizations get in return is qualified individuals with the necessary skills to perform their tasks well. This will increase employee productivity and help the organization achieve its goals, leading to a better ROI.

Employees are also likely to remain in organizations that invest in them. Prepare employee development programs and offer a growth opportunity to your employees. This will help you retain your best employees as they will have no reason to seek employment elsewhere.

With employee training, workers don’t have to take a leave of absence to attend classes. Most courses are now offered online like this short accounting course that individuals can take during their free time.

#5. Make Onboarding Seamless

Onboarding is a vital moment for making workers feel included from the first day. It sets the tone for their stay at your organization and lays the foundation for employees to excel in their job.

A new employee can have all the skills required to perform their job but they still need to know how things work in your organization. They need to know who to reach out to when they need certain tools for a job.

They need to know how to structure their reports after an assignment, and so on. Such things may look insignificant but they are important for new employees to settle in an organization.

That's why providing a smooth onboarding experience is crucial if you want to raise employee engagement. You can do this by taking the time to show a new employee how things work in your organization.

For example, if you have a growing business, you should show them how they will use email marketing tools such as ConvertKit alternatives to prepare the right email marketing strategy.

#6. Invest in Team Building

As a business owner, your priority would be to generate great income and drive business growth. But for best results, it’s important to invest in team building through events and meet-ups.

Through team building events, you can create a special bonding between your team members, which enables them to perform better and work in cohesion.

It’s especially important for remote team members who could typically end up feeling disconnected with the team as they don’t get the same level of engagement as in-house employees. In fact, 15% of remote workers feel lonely and another 8% have difficulty collaborating with their colleagues.

Source: Buffer

Organizing online team building sessions in such a situation can be a great way to enhance employee bonding and engagement.

What’s more?

If your budget permits, it could also help to organize annual team retreats where remote team members could connect with each other in-person. It helps them bond on things other than work and helps boost organizational engagement.

Numerous remote-first companies like Toggl and Convert host such team retreats to help their employees bond and engage with each other.

Conclusion

Now that you know the importance of employee engagement, it’s time to get to work and raise it in your organization. The strategies I have shared above will help you make your employees feel valued and also help them grow—whether as SEO professionals or developers.

As a result, they will go above and beyond for your company which will result in increased employee productivity, higher employee retention, and improved company performance.