The number one reason you must find new strategies to increase employee engagement in the workplace is because of this: YOUR ORGANIZATION DOES NOT EXIST WITHOUT ENGAGED EMPLOYEES. The reason you have an organization is that you have people who work there, hence it is to your utmost advantage to discover strategies to improve employee engagements(1).
How to Increase Employee Engagement in the Workplace
The outline below is one of the best employees’ engagement strategies so that you can have an employee engagement strategy template for you to improve employee engagement.
1. Create a Safe Place for employees to voice their concerns
Show them that their opinions matter to you and they will become more loyal and engaged in moving the enterprise/organization forward.
2. Promote Team Bonding
Create team bonding/building activities where employees get to spend time with other employees in the workplace – with knowledge comes the ability to trust and improved team effort.
3. Mentor Your Employees
Have an open-door policy and be patient with your employees. Show your employees that you are willing to help them become better personally, and they will follow you professionally.
4. Pat Your Employees on the back
It is very easy to criticize or correct employees when they get it wrong, but the workplace does not reward them when they get it right because it is expected of them, thus a job well done is overlooked. Reward your employees for a job well done, pat them on the back as this will spur them to want to do more and be more engaged.
5. Reward Team Effort and Results
People will not work together when they feel that they have to lose if someone else wins. Build a culture of win-win and reward collaborations over individual results. This will force your employees to work together and build a win-win culture in the workplace.
6. Promote Health and Wellness in the Workplace
Encourage exercising as a general activity in the workplace. This will not only improve team bonding and collaboration, but it will also improve their general health and wellness.
7. Set Clear Goals and Responsibilities
You want to increase employee engagement in the workplace, empower them by helping them set personal goals in line with organizational goals, and give them more clear-cut responsibilities, and you will find they will put their creativity to meeting the goals set.
8. Make New Employees Feel welcome
Nothing says you belong here, and we are glad you are here more than a great onboarding process. It gives new hires the “feel good, we are happy to have you here” important feeling of I belong somewhere.
9. Be Open-minded
With flexibility comes news ways of meeting goals and solving problems in the workplace. Remove rigidity and allow your employees’ room to maneuver and watch your employees give you their heart.
10. Promote Employee Personal Growth
Time is life. So, for employees to give you their time, it means they are giving you their life, and when you help employees achieve their personal goals, they, in turn, will help the organization achieve her goals.
11. Create Your Own Office Environment
Show your employees that they are unique and different from any other organization, and they will strive to keep that uniqueness as their identity.
12. Focus on Attitude and Traits not always talent
Reward hard work, integrity, and honesty and not always results. This shows your employees that you have values and standard and they will work to meet those standards. Employ this same strategy when you hire.
13. Add Fun to the Workplace
Like the saying “all work and no play make Jack a dull boy”, add fun activities into your workplace. Have game Friday or go out to the beach together. Just have fun
14. Encourage Job Focus
It takes two sides to build a bridge. Allowing employees to focus on what they do best gives employees the freedom to attend to tasks that they enjoy.
15. Promote Networking
Allow your employees to increase their relationships by encouraging them to network and gain exposure. This will benefit your organization immensely.
16. Turn Employees to Partners
The best way to achieve this is by allowing the employees to create the mission statement by themselves. This will give them a sense of community and the feeling that they are a part of something meaningful.
Also Read: 10 Successful Employee Engagement Strategies Every CHRO Should Implement
17. Work for a Cause
People like to give back in their little ways, and by making use of philanthropy, you give employees the chance to work to give for a cause.
18. Don’t Monetize Rewards
One of the basic needs of humans is the need to be appreciated. Find creative ways outside money to reward your employees for work done and they will find more productive ways to improve the workplace
19. Help Your Employees to be seen
People want to be seen and heard, so treat your employees as assets and not liabilities, improve their skills and personal lives.
20. Give Room for Personal Development
You want your employees to be engaged in the workplace, marry organizational goals with personal goals and give your employees time and opportunity to develop themselves. Their personal development will improve the workplace generally and the results they produce. This is really to your advantage.
21. Remember and Celebrate Anniversaries, Weddings and Accomplishments
Celebrating their anniversaries and accomplishment gives them a sense of importance and that you care, and they will repay you by giving their all to the workplace.
22. Find New Ways to Engage Employees
Be creative in engaging your employees. Find ways to engage them that works for you.
23. Empower Your Employees
Give your people a budget to satisfy customer needs. This helps them to be more helpful to customer complaints and increases their engagement because they don’t want to break your trust.
24. Go out of the office
This will endear your employees to you as they begin to think more like a family, than as colleagues.
25. Empower Your Staff to have “side projects”
This shows trust and you care about them and their aspirations. They will also make you and your project a priority.
26. Encourage work exchange
Swap roles periodically in the workplace as this will create diversity and increase their capacity to deliver more.
27. Take Out time to think and brainstorm
Nothing says engaging than having your employees think and brainstorm alongside you. It shows you value them
28. Schedule quarterly “sides by sides”
Let employees think, brainstorm and create side by side. This will promote a culture of “we are in this together”
29. Empower Your Staff to make their own rules
This shows you trust them to do the right thing and they will be accountable to you.
30. Create Equality – Operate on the first-name basis
This gives them a sense of equality and friendship, thus promoting trust and a good working relationship.
31. Hire from the inside first
Reward loyalty by giving your employees the first right to turn down a position. This helps them believe you value them and want them to grow professionally.
32. Public Honor leads to Private Influence
Celebrate achievements and work well done in public, either via award nights or other ways. This spurs them to want to do more
33. Let your staff determine their dress code
This has the same impact as them choosing their sick leaves or being a part of drafting the mission statement for the workplace.
34. Nudge Your People to do more periodically
Give them an external push by motivating them to achieve their goals and give more. Bring in motivational speakers periodically.
35. Have a potluck lunch on Thursday or Friday
Have a love feast and encourage employees to share a meal.
Employee Engagement Challenges
The factors that affect employee engagement in the workplace include but not limited to the following;
1. Not included in the decision-making process.
When employees do not have a say in the decisions that affect them, they will not be engaged in the workplace and will not always go the extra mile to produce results.
2. Our Employees are our Assets
This is one lie that most organizations tell. If your employees are assets, how come their salaries and training are on the expenditures and not assets? When you treat your people as tools, they too will use you to achieve their goals and leave the first chance they get.
3. Lack of Aligned Goals
You want a different goal and your employees have their own goals they want to achieve. Where they feel that achieving your goals doesn’t help them personally, they won’t be fully engaged.
4. No Job Security
It is very baffling how employers threaten their employees’ job security and expect them to be engaged. People need to feel safe and where they do not, they will find safety and assurance elsewhere.
5. Treating Your Customers better than your staff.
How you treat your staff is how they will treat your customers. In trying to satisfy customers, employers treat their employees shabbily, to their own detriment.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, you need to employ these employee engagement strategies so you can have their hearts. When this happens, you have their creativity, ingenuity and above all their loyalty, and you will be able to attain all the goals you have set.
What this template will help you achieve is to mitigate employee engagement challenges. Employees will be more engaged in the workplace when they have a sense of safety/security in their jobs, will treat your customers with care and importance because they feel important, and will give you their best because you have aligned their personal goals and advancement with the organizational goals and advancement.
