Employee engagement is often a hot topic in business strategy and management meetings, and for a good reason. Having employees who are engaged in their work is vital to limiting turnover and improving work quality and productivity.
In this article, we’ll share some ideas on how to improve your employee engagement, as well as more about what employee engagement is and why it’s important.
Key Takeaways:
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Much of improving employee engagement involves showing your workers you value them as people.
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Engaged employees are enthusiastic about and invested in their jobs and the organization.
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Good employee engagement increases employee longevity and productivity and lowers absenteeism.
Ideas for Employee Engagement
Here are some ideas for helping your employees engage more with their work and the company.
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Base your onboarding process on connection. One of the best ways to improve employee engagement is to connect them with the organization as soon as they join it. This means introducing them to people around the office, setting up lunch outings with coworkers, and getting to know them as individuals.
Employees who feel welcomed and connected right off the bat are going to have a far easier time engaging with their work than those who don’t.
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Establish a company (or team) vision and culture. It’s great for you to have a vision statement for your company or team, but unless you’re incorporating that into the rest of your operations, it does you no good.
Establish a vision, communicate it to your employees, and then live it out in the way you interact with your team, in what you celebrate and honor, and in what you prioritize. Having a consistent culture based on a set of values will give employees something to engage with, rather than leaving them to figure it out for themselves.
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Celebrate. Whether it’s hitting a quarterly goal, finding a better way to do a task, or simply finishing a project or busy season, celebrate your employees. Take them out to lunch, give them a gift card or prize, or recognize them at your next meeting. For everyday achievements, you can even have fun with it and hand out gold star stickers.
When your employees feel seen and appreciated, they’re more likely to stay engaged and stick around.
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Get to know what drives your individual employees. The tricky part of improving employee engagement is that every employee and group of employees are motivated by different things. Pay attention to what makes your employees light up, or just ask them what motivates them and what would make their jobs easier.
While you likely can’t give them everything they suggest, pick one or two things that you can do and then do them. Whether it’s providing a few work-from-home days a month or making adjustments to the meeting schedule, your workers will be far more engaged when they feel that their opinions and needs are heard and valued.
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Plan time for fun. Set aside a time every once in a while where you do something fun for your employees. Pay for them and their families to visit the local zoo or water park, or take a cooking class with your team – during work hours.
You don’t need to do this so often that people get annoyed that they can’t get their work done, but showing employees you care more about them than their work goes a long way in helping them stay engaged.
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Create a face-to-face connection. If you have remote employees or a branch you don’t often see, bring them into the main office or meet with them in person regularly. Whether you go to them or pay for them to come to you, it’s important to be able to interact in person.
You can only connect so much over Zoom, and it’s easy for workers who are away from the main offices to feel lost or left out. Being able to be together in person helps employees feel like they’re connected to the organization and will improve engagement.
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Provide opportunities for professional development and learning. Give your employees clear opportunities for professional growth, and then encourage them to take those opportunities guilt-free.
If you want to take this a step farther, ask each of your workers what skill they’d like to learn or improve in, and then help them find a class or training to accomplish that.
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Find a way to be more transparent. Even if you already feel like you’re pretty transparent with your employees, look for additional ways to communicate even more clearly and honestly with them. You could even ask them where they feel you could improve transparency or simply set aside a time where they can ask about anything.
This will help employees feel heard and like they’re a part of the organization, not just a pawn at the mercy of leadership’s mysterious decision-making.
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Show that you value work-life balance. Make it easy for your employees to go home and be there when their families need them, offer work-from-home days or options, and encourage your workers to take time off regularly.
This will not only help your employees feel valued, but it will also help decrease burnout, both of which boost employee engagement.
What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is when employees are enthusiastic and invested in both their jobs and the organization as a whole. Engaged employees get involved with the company and care about its overall success, which means they’ll also do their jobs better.
While part of having good employee engagement depends on the individual employees, much of it falls to the company leaders and managers to work to help their employees feel and become more engaged.
Why Employee Engagement Is Important
Employee engagement is important for several reasons, including increasing employee longevity and performance and lowering absenteeism. All of these help improve companies’ bottom lines as well.
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It increases employee longevity. Employees who are engaged with and invested in their companies are more likely to stick around. This is because they feel valued and that their work has meaning instead of feeling like a cog in a machine that they have zero control over.
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It improves employee performance. Employees who care about their work do better work. Employees who are engaged with their jobs also often grow professionally, which means they expand and strengthen their skillsets and add even more to the organization.
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It lowers absenteeism. Absentee employees are those workers who are either regularly late or absent from work or who are technically at work but don’t do much. Engaged employees, on the other hand, want to do their work because it helps the team.
This means that they’ll call out of work when they need to, but they’re more likely to show up as much as possible and will do what they can to not leave their team hanging when they aren’t there.
Employee Engagement Ideas FAQ
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What are examples of employee engagement?
Examples of employee engagement include a commitment to the organization, working with purpose and excellence, and being collaborative. If you have a company full of people who care about their jobs and are consistently looking for ways to improve the organization, chances are you have high employee engagement.
Employees who are engaged with their work want to do it well and want to help their coworkers do the same. Beyond succeeding in their own jobs, they want to see the organization succeed, which means they’re more likely to work collaboratively with others instead of competing with them.
Managers don’t have to force engaged employees to show up and do their work, and they prioritize swapping feedback and ideas with their workers rather than simply telling them what to do.
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How do I make Friday fun at work?
You can make Friday fun at work by instituting a tradition or perk of some kind. You could bring coffee for your employees, let them come in 30 minutes late or go home 30 minutes early, or allow them to dress more casually than usual.
You could even start a tradition of playing a quick, goofy game in the afternoon – motivation is already likely lagging at this point, so you might as well get some team bonding out of it.
If in doubt, talk to your team to figure out what they would like to do on Fridays so that you choose something that they appreciate and enjoy.
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How do I bring my employees together?
You bring your employees together by creating and following a shared vision, having fun together, and recognizing and celebrating each other.
Whether you lead a whole company or one team, you need to have an established vision and set of values. If you already have these in place, work together to figure out how you can implement them on a practical level or create a smaller vision and values for your specific team.
This will help keep everyone on the same page and clarify expectations. It will also give your employees something bigger than their individual jobs to work toward as a team.
In addition to this, one of the best ways to bring employees together is to have fun together. This could be as simple as chatting over donuts and coffee on a Friday morning or going to do a group activity once a quarter.
You also need to regularly recognize and celebrate your employees for their contributions to the group. You can ask them to do this for each other as well, whether that’s through a shout-out in your weekly team meeting or by allowing them to give small bonuses or awards to each other to say thanks.
Author
Caitlin Mazur
Caitlin Mazur is a freelance writer at Zippia where she has written 140+ articles that have reached over 1 mil viewers as of June 2023. Caitlin is passionate about helping Zippia’s readers land the jobs of their dreams by offering content that discusses job-seeking advice based on experience and extensive research.
