Proven Techniques to Maintain High Levels of Employee Engagement
One of the top priorities for leaders in an organization is creating a high levels of employee engagement. However, this is a metric that can be nearly impossible to measure, which makes the process a challenging one. Human resources professionals, psychologists, and academics have consistently disagreed about what factors drive performance and engagement for a business. This makes it difficult for businesses to decide the best places to invest energy, time, and money to create positive changes.
The reality is that reaching that level of engagement will improve performance, but it requires several things. Managers and other leaders will need to ensure employees feel fulfilled in their position, connected to the company’s vision, and entirely supported. Keeping this all in mind, it might seem as if the process is too massive and complicated to get anywhere, but it can be made a lot simpler than you might expect.
We’ll be sharing a few techniques below that can be implemented quickly which are proven to help boost employee engagement across an entire organization. Implement them at your organization to ensure employees are motivated to offer their highest levels of performance, something that benefits everyone at the company.
Build a Culture of Support
Creating and keeping an inclusive culture is something that directly ties into high levels of workplace engagement. The companies that everyone wants to work hard for are often the same companies that prioritize creating a specific set of conditions that let people do their absolute best every day. It takes work but it’s well worth it and can make the people who work in a company want to help the business succeed.
Deciding to have a diverse and inclusive environment is simple enough, but actually going through the steps to create that reality can take time and effort. The kind of culture that empowers everyone in the workforce is one where every person across the company feels accepted for exactly who they are. On the other hand, if employees don’t feel accepted, they may be less open and honest. This can result in a team that is afraid to take calculated risks or even to share a unique opinion with their coworkers.
Think Differently About Performance
Some leaders and members of management are under the impression that performance is something that can be managed directly, but this isn’t the case. Performance is a byproduct or an outcome. The optimal way to ensure top performance in a company is by tapping into intrinsic, deeper motivation. Intrinsic motivation can be tricky since it is motivation that is based on an employee having a genuine interest in their responsibilities and roles instead of any external benefits that could be obtained from doing something at its best.
The performance of any employee ties into how often that person has the opportunity to use their unique strengths. Rather than focusing solely on performance, it can be more useful to work with workers on the best way to unlock their talents. This means taking a genuine interest in who your employees are at people, where they are now, and where they want to end up months or years down the line.
Assist Employees in Becoming Their Best Selves
It doesn’t matter who someone is, we all have an unstoppable desire to have our talents be fulfilled and realized, something that is often referred to as self-actualization. As a leader or manager, it’s essential to build a safe environment for everyone to be who they are. This means that you should support the development of all employees’ strengths and build roles where those strengths can be used every single day.
When an employee is doing the things they love and are good at, they are going to feel better coming into work every day. These workers know that they are moving toward a better self every day they sit down and work on projects and tasks at your company. This can create motivation that leads to increased productivity regularly.
Bring Personal Goals into the Organization’s Mission
When a company and its leaders are working toward the same goal, success moves from being something that is achievable to something that is a nearly guaranteed result. Using company key results and objectives, leaders have often created teams that are endlessly high-performing. The members of these teams also happen to be fulfilled and fully engaged in the workplace.
Improving customer NPS and creating additional revenue are excellent places for leaders to focus, but impact is the driving force on many people. The best way to create meaningful goals is by creating company objectives that motivate workers and give them the chance to add their own personal key results to the objectives.
Acknowledge and Recognize Employees
Employees tend to be more productive, engaged, and creative when the people who manage them take the time to highlight their strengths. The process of providing regular acknowledgment and recognition can lessen some of the daily tension that a worker feels. It also results in boosting morale. Research on the topics shows that the best-performing teams are more supportive than those who do the bare minimum.
This doesn’t require a large input of energy. One option is to stop and having a short one-on-one where you recognize someone for the effort that they have put in. Another solution is to acknowledge team members in a weekly email or a meeting. What matters is showing that you care about how engaged and productive your workers are, which is something that can motivate them to work even harder.
Employee engagement is important and hard to measure, but it still has to be taken into consideration. Motivated and engaged employees are the ones who are going to put in the extra mile to ensure a company’s success. If this is something that you want to focus on, consider the techniques above to ensure you hit the mark and are a leader that employees can count on.