Employee engagement is a concept related to understanding and explaining the relationship between an organization and its employees. It usually refers to the mental and emotional side of the employees’ commitment to their work and organization. It is an approach that revolves around trust, honesty, two-way commitment and communication between an organization and its members. It contributes to the workplace regarding both corporate and individual performance while increasing productivity and efficiency.
What Makes Employee Engagement Important?
Employee engagement should be considered essential to any organization or workplace for various reasons. Why, you might ask. Here are some solid reasons for you to grasp the significance of employee engagement:
Increased Productivity
Employees who are committed to their tasks are more productive than those who are not. Engaged employees tend to own the work they are doing for your organization and once they own the work, they commit to it and put more effort into it. Employees being committed and engaged means that they would come to work with the aim of accomplishing their tasks which would result in higher participation rates and decreased absenteeism in the workplace.
Lower Quits Rates –Higher Employee Retention
Engaged employees do not feel the need to change their current workplace because they feel comfortable in their work atmosphere. They have a space to improve themselves and conduct their work in the most efficient way possible. To put it simply, they would have all their needs in their workplace and they don’t want to change it which means that your organization’s employee retention is likely to increase.
Keeping Your Team Qualified
Having the ideal workplace for your employees will not only help you keep your talented and qualified employees but also help you become a wanted candidate for other talented and qualified employees. As your organization becomes an ideal workplace, the best candidates for you will regard you as their best candidate. In order to increase your organization’s value, you should first work on yourself; you should start walking so that your new employees could help you run faster.
Providing a Lively and Efficient Work Environment
For employees, being in a workplace that doesn’t meet their expectations is a strong source of stress. Not being able to work on their tasks, not feeling comfortable with their organization, or not having enough space for individual progress would make the employees feel restricted. When employees feel restricted and under pressure, their stress level increases which affects their mental and physical health. One person feeling overwhelmed would affect the whole atmosphere of a team and this situation becomes a slippery slope for you. You have to make sure that your employees are engaged and don’t feel uncomfortable so that you could have a happy and lively workplace which in turn would result in high rates of efficiency.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Employee engagement does not have an individual connotation. It affects the whole team and the organization; therefore, it is very much likely to benefit the whole organization as well. Happy employee means higher efficiency; higher efficiency means happier customers. By simply making sure that your employees are satisfied and happy, you can ensure the satisfaction of your customers.
How to Increase Employee Engagement?
Hire The Right Person
If you want the highest rates of employee engagement, trying to keep them involved, happy, and satisfied won’t be enough. Before trying for them, you should make sure the right people are there working with you. If a person is not compatible with your organization, its vision, mission, and goals; then it means that this person is not the right person for your organization. In order to determine the right employee for your organization, you have a variety of tests that can be conducted by Test Invite. Owing to the wide range of measurement tests and exams provided by Test Invite, you have the opportunity to see if the candidate is the right person for your organization. You have the chance to see if they are suitable to your company culture or the position they are applying to by simply conducting these tests which assess and evaluate your candidates.
Offer Employees Better Than Your Competitors
While you are trying to choose and hire the best employees for your organization, the employees are trying to choose the best organization for their careers. So that means they are not the only candidates in the business world; you are also a candidate. If you want the best employees, then you should be their best choice.
Prioritize Employee Happiness: Don’t Forget to Appreciate and Reward
The best way to encourage someone is to notice, appreciate and reward their work. Employees’ motivation and engagement tend to increase after accomplishing something; that accomplishment getting recognition and appreciation would motivate them into getting more accomplishments, in other words more recognition and appreciation.
Provide Flexible Working Conditions
Flexible working conditions help employees to have a space for themselves to make their own schedule and that increases their productivity. You can periodically evaluate your employees and their performance in order to define the problems in your working conditions and increase productivity. Increased productivity will boost the employee’s motivation and will lead to increased engagement.
Create Opportunities to Develop and Grow
Make room for your employees to improve themselves and express their ideas and emotions. By occasionally assessing your employees’ progress, needs, and wants, you can track the growth of the organization. Employees’ personal growth would affect their team and therefore the whole organization. Individual improvements lead to organizational improvement.
Make Your Employees Feel Accepted, and Respected in A Free and Comfortable Environment
Make diversity a part of your culture. Your organization should prioritize having a wide range of diverse employees. Having diversity in the workplace would hinder the feeling of exclusion, increasing the employees’ confidence in their work. Therefore, their motivation and engagement are likely to increase. By using online assessment tools, creating your own quizzes and tests, you can measure and assess your candidates’ skills and talents. This way you guarantee the width of the diversity range of different ideas, skills, and talents in your organization.
Signs of A Disengaged Employee
There are several ways to see if your employees are disengaged or not. By observing their work or assessing and measuring their productivity at regular intervals, you can determine your employees’ engagement rate. Here are some points that would give you hints about disengagement:
- Lack of motivation, productivity, and decrease in the quality of work,
- Social withdrawal: Withdrawal from the team, lack of communication and participation,
- Rise in absenteeism and breaks during working hours,
- Irregularity in working hours.
Causes of Employee Disengagement
Before trying to solve a problem, you should always get to the root of the problem. It means that if you want engaged employees, you should understand the causes of disengagement in your organization. Since every organization is different from one another, you should try to observe and understand the mistakes of your organization. You should communicate with your employees, ask them their needs and complaints, you should conduct satisfaction tests or questionnaires on occasion and take into account their feedback. Whatever the needs and complaints of your employees are, there are several causes of employee disengagement that is usually common among organizations:
- Unsatisfactory payment
- Stressful working environment
- Ineffective management and leadership
- Lack of appreciation and feedback
Common Strategic Mistakes in Internal Communication
No matter what specific cause might be in your case, the most common source of the disengagement problems is usually internal communication. If you want to eliminate the causes of employee disengagement in your organization, you should first consider and revise the internal communication of your organization. So what kinds of mistakes you might be making?
- Lack of shared company culture and ignored core values,
- Poor communication among employees,
- A work environment closed to professional and personal development,
- Ignoring employee feedback.
Why Measure Employee Happiness and Engagement?
The term employee engagement is usually confused with terms such as employee happiness, employee satisfaction; however, employee engagement includes these other terms. So why should you make a distinction between these terms? Employee engagement is used to define the long-term conditions of employee-organization relationships which are affected by employees’ satisfaction and happiness rates. A satisfied or happy employee may not be fully engaged; however, an engaged employee is a satisfied and happy employee. In order to determine the engagement rates of the employees, one should first determine the short-term conditions such as satisfaction and happiness. There occurs another question: Why should you measure and determine all these conditions? As organizations, you are obliged to develop and grow yourselves. If you want to grow and develop, the first thing you should do is to determine and measure your deficiencies, problems, and strengths. For this aim, the most efficient way to measure these conditions is to conduct employee engagement and happiness surveys.
Your Most Important Customers Are Your Employees
Treat your employees like your most valuable, most important customers. Care for them, listen to their needs. Create an environment in which they will be comfortable and happy, and include individuals who are suitable for this environment, but do not let this put your company in a position that lacks diversity. Don’t overlook your employees’ thoughts and emotions, regard and value their presence and appreciate their contribution. So you don’t lose valuable talents, but make new talents dream of joining you.
