Have you ever sat down, ready to enjoy a movie premiere you’ve been waiting for, only to find yourself quickly getting sidetracked and checking your email or scrolling social media on your phone?
Most likely the distraction isn’t because the information on your phone is so pressing that it requires your immediate attention, but rather that the movie is so uninspiring that it hasn’t fully captured your interest.
An organization’s leader is like a movie’s director. Its success or failure falls to you.
Your team is the audience, and it is your job to captivate and engage them. If you aren’t able to do so, your organization will suffer. Although others in your workplace will play a supporting role in maintaining their engagement, implementing employee engagement strategies starts with you.
Workplace engagement is an incredibly important part of achieving professional success, but it’s not a one-and-done initiative. Leaders that recognize how powerful employee engagement in the workplace is are constantly seeking ways to enhance it and inspire their team to do more.
The most successful Extreme Leaders also identify key ways to measure engagement and elevate it to the next level.
This starts by engaging an experienced and knowledgeable business motivational speaker like Steve Farber, who will help identify the key drivers of employee engagement at your organization and teach you how to maximize employee engagement and productivity.
Why is Workplace Engagement Important and How to Measure It
The hard work of your team enables you to grow your business. When they are successful, so is your organization, but if they lack focus and drive, your bottom line will be what suffers.
Employee engagement and productivity go hand-in-hand, so it’s critical to your success to implement effective employee engagement strategies and foster a work culture of positivity and collaboration. This engagement makes employees more likely to want to contribute to business productivity and reach their full potential at work.
Engaged employees are emotionally and mentally invested in their work. They feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for the organization’s success and are much more apt to unearth their inner creativity, offer innovative ideas, go above and beyond to provide the best service possible to their clients or customers. Employee engagement also leads to greater retention, as employees who feel a sense of pride and satisfaction in their work are less likely to seek out other employment. This results in greater productivity and lower turnover costs.
As an Extreme Leader, you can work on improving employee engagement by understanding what contributes to it. A great way to measure employee engagement in the workplace is to create an open and honest dialogue with your team about how they feel in their individual roles, review their absenteeism, and introduce performance reviews.
Since employee engagement and performance are directly linked, you will be able to spot early warning signs of low engagement, enabling you to implement the following employee engagement strategies to counteract it. This early intervention will boost employee engagement and increase productivity before it negatively impacts your business.
7 Ways to Improve Employee Engagement
Extreme leaders recognize how important employee engagement is and never stop seeking innovative ways to improve it. By following the 7 employee engagement strategies outlined below, you can increase workplace engagement and create growth and greater success for your organization.
1. Clarifying Tasks and Roles
Extreme Leaders know that employee engagement and performance are essential and in order to empower employees to be their best, they require clarification about their tasks and roles. When employees clearly understand the requirements, expectations, and goals of their job, they are much more likely to be engaged in their work.
Information is power.
By ensuring your team knows what is expected of them and understands how they each contribute to the organization’s mission, you are offering them a feeling of control over their work and instilling a sense of pride in what they do.
Additionally, when your employees see that you trust them, it deepens their engagement even further, which will ultimately result in greater success for your business.
2. Create Daily Work Goals
Having clear goals to work towards is incredibly motivating. In the workplace, it improves an employee’s focus and discipline, builds accountability, and promotes a dynamic work ethic.
Having manageable, measurable, and attainable daily goals gives employees a sense of purpose and motivation to do their best. Additionally, working collaboratively to achieve daily goals builds stronger relationships between employees and their leaders.
Giving your team work that is meaningful and showing them that their contributions are valued goes a long way towards improving employee engagement.
3. Provide Opportunities to Grow
As a leader, encouraging growth is vital to cultivating employee engagement in the workplace. The best way to show your support as a leader and that you believe in your team’s individual and shared success, is by providing opportunities for growth.
When people feel stuck in a rut, they are much more likely to become disengaged and feel unmotivated. In the workplace, this can have a devastating impact on productivity.
One of the key drivers of employee engagement is motivation, which can be increased by offering your team opportunities to learn and grow.
Ensure your employees are engaged and invested in their work by offering training and leadership development programs, rotational or flexible work assignments, and leadership coaching opportunities. By investing in your employees’ growth, you can boost employee engagement and create a more positive workplace.
4. Show Love by Listening to Your Employees
Don’t tune your employees out like you might with that movie that didn’t catch your full attention. In the same way that you want your team to be engaged in their work, they want you to be engaged in your interactions with them. You can show them that they matter by leading with love and listening to what they have to say.
Not only does active listening show your employees that you value their opinions, it also helps build trust and understanding. In addition to fostering a positive business culture and boosting employee engagement, this also helps create healthier work relationships.
5. Encourage Social Time and Collaboration within Teams
Human beings are social creatures, and a leader who understands and celebrates that will find themselves with increased employee engagement. By encouraging social interactions and collaboration, you offer employees an incredible opportunity to work together towards a shared goal. This builds trust and commitment to each other and their organization, and greater engagement overall.
As a leader, creating a diverse and inclusive work environment offers a space where different ideas are welcomed and encouraged. This is critical to boosting engagement and leads to socializing together, which helps employees feel connected to their coworkers.
You can further encourage social interactions by hosting corporate events like staff get-togethers, inviting a business motivational speaker, offering team happy hours, or by providing locations for employees to socialize in the office, such as lounges or game rooms.
6. Recognize and Appreciate Employees
There is nothing that contributes to employee engagement more than recognition and appreciation. When your team knows that their contributions are valued and make a difference to you and your organization, they will be motivated to continue giving their best efforts at work.
There are so many ways that you can recognize employees, from giving awards to offering monetary appreciation like bonuses or raises. No matter how large or small the gesture, any form of recognition can boost employee engagement and retention.
When you recognize your employees, it lets them know that you appreciate their hard work and dedication. By taking time to show your gratitude, you will build stronger interpersonal relationships and create a more positive workplace.
7. Promote a Healthy Working Culture
Another extremely effective way to engage employees is by promoting a healthy lifestyle. While the majority of maintaining healthy habits occurs outside of the workplace, there are ways that you can foster well-being at work that will carry over to your employee’s personal lives as well.
You can kickstart a healthy lifestyle by offering on-site gyms, healthy food options in the cafeteria, or discounts on fitness memberships. Not only does this show your employees that their overall health and well-being matter to you, it also helps prevent burnout and makes them feel good at work.
An added benefit is that, as your team begins enjoying the healthy options available at work, you will see an overall increase in employee productivity and morale.
Implement Employee Engagement Strategies to Get Your Team Excited about Work Again
Extreme Leaders recognize that success requires teamwork and effective teams are built on employee engagement. With the support of an executive leadership coach or business motivational speaker like Steve Farber, along with implementing the strategies outlined above, you will be well on your way to elevating your employee’s excitement about work and achieving greater success for your organization.
With strong employee engagement, your organization’s potential for growth is limitless.