Blog

5 Tips to Improve and Encourage Employee Engagement

Employee engagement measures how strongly employees feel connected to their work and employer. This includes employees’ motivation to perform their best, commitment to the organization, and desire to refer others to the company.

Sustainable employee engagement is based on intrinsic motivation. This includes mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Your employees’ engagement levels impact their performance, productivity, and morale. It also affects retention and your bottom line.

Engaged employees are passionate, energetic, and committed to your organization. They go above and beyond to support company strategy and elevate your employer brand.

As a result, you must do what you can to improve and encourage employee engagement. Here are some suggestions.

Choose among these five tips to improve and encourage employee engagement.

1. Live Your Company’s Culture

Convey your company’s mission, vision, and values in your behaviors. This encourages your employees to follow suit. It also shows they are part of something bigger than they are.

Using your actions to demonstrate your culture enhances the work environment. It also adds meaning to your employees’ jobs.

Living your company’s culture shows your values align with business functions. This encourages buy-in from your employees.

Employees who understand the company’s culture feel inspired. This encourages employee engagement.

2. Prioritize Onboarding

Your onboarding process impacts how your employees view your company and their jobs. It helps your new hires align with company culture and understand how their role impacts your organization.

Use your onboarding process to show what makes your company unique and why your new hire’s role is essential for team and business success. Include information about the role and expectations. This promotes employee engagement.

3. Emphasize Career Development

Work with each employee to customize a career development plan. Include the knowledge, skills, and experience required to advance within your organization.

Provide the necessary training and development to move to more senior roles. This may include stretch assignments, cross-training, or mentoring. It also could involve seminars, conferences, or classes. Having a clear path for advancement supports employee engagement and retention.

4. Provide Employee Recognition

Regularly point out each employee’s accomplishments. Include the actions your employee took, their results, and how they impacted the organization. Provide a bonus, pay increase, or promotion when appropriate.

Recognizing your employees shows you appreciate their contributions and results. This encourages employee motivation, performance, and engagement.

5. Encourage Feedback

Remind your employees to give and receive constructive feedback. This helps your employees feel informed, heard, and respected.

Your employees can uncover inefficiencies in performing their work and suggest improvements. This enhances work processes and creates a more productive environment.

Consistently finding ways to improve employee and company performance helps reach career and business goals. This encourages employee engagement.

Need to Improve Employee Engagement?

Partner with RightStone to help improve employee engagement. Learn more today.


Ask Your Employees These 6 Trust-Building Questions

Creating a cohesive team requires trust. You must trust your employees to complete quality work on time. Also, your employees must trust they will be compensated for their contributions.

Building trust can be especially difficult when you have new, introverted, or remote employees. However, trust is essential to help your employee remain engaged, productive, and loyal to the organization.

Asking questions and actively listening to the answers is an effective way to build trust with your employees. Questions lead to conversations. Conversations build engagement and trust.

Ask your employees these six trust-building questions to increase cohesion among your team.

1. What is a great movie you recently watched?

Talking about movies helps your employees feel like they are talking with a casual friend. This promotes a casual work environment. You may learn about a movie that interests you. Watching it can help you connect with your employees on a personal level.

2. Can you recommend a book you recently read?

The types of books your employees read provide insight into their minds. You can learn about your employees’ thoughts, philosophies, and sense of morality. You also can uncover whether you like the same types of books or authors. This promotes mental connections.

3. What is the strangest meal you ever ate?

Your employees may have eaten tarantulas, snails, or other exotic food. Talking about these experiences promotes a relaxed atmosphere. It also helps you get to know your employees on a deeper level.

4. Do you prefer beer, wine, or neither?

Most employees enjoy humorous discussions about alcohol. You can use this topic to determine whether any of your employees prefer nonalcoholic beverages. This helps you provide appropriate beverages when you host an event.

5. If you could develop a new skill in 10 minutes, which skill would you choose?

Understanding the skills your employees are interested in is important. These skills indicate potential goals and career paths for your employees. You can implement training programs to help your employees reach their goals and advance their careers.

6. Which emerging technological innovation will significantly impact the industry in the next five years?

Find out what your employees think about the future of your industry. Also, determine where they see themselves working long-term. Talk about whether there are opportunities within your organization that may interest your employees. Discussing internal career advancement elevates employee retention.

Do You Need to Hire More Employees?

Hire top technologists with help from RightStone. Learn more today.


Surprise Your Team to Promote Employee Connection

 

An April 2022 Gallup survey showed that only 32% of employees were engaged at work. Disengaged employees are not very productive. They lower employee morale and retention.

To improve engagement levels, building employee connections should be among your top priorities. One way to accomplish this objective is by doing something unexpected for your team.

When humans experience change, they process what happened, then return to their typical level of happiness. This is beneficial when, for example, an employee is passed over for a promotion. They will return to their baseline happiness within a few days.

However, this adaptation to change is unfavorable when employees get used to the perks they regularly experience at work. For instance, if you provide bagels for your team every Tuesday, they will expect to eat bagels every Tuesday. At some point, your employees no longer will see eating bagels on Tuesday as an advantage of working for your company.

As a result, you want to regularly provide employees with novel experiences. This consistently disrupts their typical levels of happiness. The more times you add to your team’s happiness, the more fun they have. This increases engagement, productivity, morale, and retention.

Implement these tips to surprise your team and build employee connections.


Promote Creativity

Incorporate the “yes, and!” structure into your next brainstorming session. When one employee shares an idea, the next employee says “Yes, and…” to build on it. This activity encourages your team to develop what they have into something bigger.

Encourage Play

Put board games or question cards in the break room. Suggest coworkers play the games or ask each other questions during their downtime.

If your team is remote, use a video conferencing app like Mibo to create immersive online experiences for your employees. They can interact with each other in the virtual environment. These actions promote happiness and well-being at work.

Facilitate Fun

Create a Slack channel dedicated to fun. The theme may be memes, office pets, or anything else your employees may find amusing. Your team can laugh at the contents to reduce stress throughout the day.

Promote Laughter

Add humor to your presentations by including a meme. Laughter helps make your content more memorable. It also promotes participation, learning, and recollection of facts.

Encourage Collaboration

Plan team-building activities to build employee connections. Also, encourage social coffee breaks and walks with coworkers during employee downtime. Participating in fun activities and socializing with coworkers increase work engagement.

Need Help Hiring?

RightStone has the skilled IT professionals you need to reach business goals. Find out more today.