Why Employee Engagement Matters and How to Achieve it
Employee engagement is a concept that can make a significant contribution to business success, yet in many ways, is still poorly understood and unappreciated. Sending round an annual employee survey might have been considered sufficient in previous generations, but there’s far more to employee engagement than asking everyone to fill in a questionnaire once a year.
At its heart, employee engagement is about good communication, taking the information your employees give you and using it to your advantage. One of the most effective ways to extract value from activities like employee surveys is to use an employee engagement platform that can collate all the data and help highlight areas that need improvement. Similarly, it will pick up on good practice that can be built upon.
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement is, in essence, getting the people who work for you to take an interest in the business and the work they do by involving them and asking for their observations and ideas. Employee engagement can take different forms, such as having an open-door policy for employees to make suggestions about workplace or business improvements, or the traditional employee survey. The methods you use are likely to depend on the size of your business. A small business owner is going to be very hands on, communicating with their team directly, whereas a larger company is likely to be more impersonal, relying far more heavily on initiatives like the annual survey.
Why does employee engagement matter?
Employee engagement is a key tool for improving productivity, because employees who care about the business rather than just turning up to earn a wage are far more productive. Multiple studies have shown that employees who feel invested in their work have a much higher productivity rate. If you’re wondering how to reward employees, then consider how you can listen more, and offer them more opportunities. If your employees feel cared for, respected, and valued, the effects can be almost magical. Rather than doing what’s required for their job but not a great deal more, employees who feel engaged work to higher standards, exceeding the basic requirements of their role and making a valuable contribution to the success of the business. Never underestimate what the role of employee engagement can play in terms of company success.
How you can take advantage of the benefits of employee engagement
If you carry out an annual employee survey, what do you do with the results? Do you have a read through, pick out any striking comments, and then file the results away satisfied you’ve done enough to tick the employee engagement box? If that’s the extent of your analysis, you’re ignoring the potential wealth locked up in your survey responses.
The data you gather in a employee survey is gold; it’s full of valuable insights and statistics that could be highly beneficial to your business, if you know how to use it. Using employee engagement analytics makes the process far more rewarding, giving you the ability to extract every valuable drop of information from your completed surveys and apply it to your practice in real-time. Asking and involving your people more often is also critical as you begin to build a better more complete picture of what is engaging and disengaging your people throughout the year, not just once.
Don’t underestimate the value of employee engagement. Paying for employees is one of your largest outgoings, and their input into your business is one of the driving factors behind your success, so it makes sense to extract the full value from every member of your team.
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