There are many ways to expand your business, with popular methods being diversifying one’s products or services, finding a new niche or market, improving referrals, and more. However, an often-overlooked way to enhance your company is to invest in your workers. That means improving their quality of life so that they can be happier, and ultimately, more productive in their job. One way to do this is to improve employee engagement.
Employee engagement is the emotional connection and enthusiasm that a worker has to the organization they do labor for. And it has a variety of advantages for your business.
The Advantages of Highly-Engaged Employees
A recent study by the Harvard Business School (HBS), in collaboration with Achievers, interviewed more than 550 leaders in the country about the factors that bring success to their business. Over 71% of the respondents said that employee engagement is vital to their overall organizational success. Some of the benefits of highly-engaged employees include the following:
Improved customer satisfaction
Over 77% of the people who prioritized employee engagement in the HBS study stated that it had an impact on their customer satisfaction. Happy and connected employees are motivated employees are more likely to provide satisfactory service, which in turn creates customer loyalty.
Better attendance
A Gallup workplace survey also tried to measure the employee engagement of different companies and their outcomes. It found that high-engagement businesses outperformed those with lower results. They had significantly lower absenteeism and turnover rates.
Enhanced productivity
The Gallup report also showed that top companies in terms of employee engagement surpassed their low-engagement counterparts by 21% in productivity. The research firm’s chief scientist for worker engagement said that engaged workers provide the best ideas that improve the company as a whole.
How to Improve Employee Engagement
Employees work better when they’re engaged. Here are ways to keep your workers connected and enthusiastic about working in your business.
Get the right managers for the job
Managers work directly with employees every day, something that you as an owner can’t do when you’re too busy solving big-picture problems for your business. If you want engaged employees, managing roles should be filled by people who have a knack for leading, not just workers with tenure. Managers should be able to understand every employee’s strengths and weaknesses and improve on each of them. With an excellent boss to interact with every day, your employees won’t hesitate to do their best at work.
Give proper recognition
Both you and your managers should provide recognition to the contributions of each employee. It’s your managers’ job to recognize the small but important ones like workers reaching or exceeding their personal goals or quotas. Your role is to acknowledge more significant contributions, like providing loyalty awards and rewarding people with the highest KPI scores. These efforts make employees feel more appreciated and engaged in the workplace.
Acknowledge and encourage employee ideas
Your workers know the ins and outs of your business. That means they likely know what improves their productivity and overall quality of life while on the job. Encourage your employees to speak up and provide their ideas, and recognize them when they do! Implement the best ones, too. Seeing you take action on your workers’ suggestions further drives home the point that their opinions matters in your business.
Consistently measure engagement
Stay on top of your engagement by always measuring it. You can do this through monthly or quarterly surveys or an employee experience solution that sends and analyzes questionnaires for you. This way, you can see if your efforts to improve engagement worked or if there are any lapses in your implementation.
If you want your company to succeed, you should set your workers up to grow, too. Apart from providing them with the right knowledge, skills, and tools from the job, you should also keep them engaged. Use these suggestions to improve and maintain your employee engagement. With enough time and effort, you’ll be able to reap its benefits, like enhanced customer satisfaction, productivity, attendance, and more.
