Employee engagement plays a crucial role in an organization’s success. Every business leader aims to ensure their employees are dedicated to the organization and putting in their best efforts. However, this is not always an easy task. Encouraging employees to be engaged in their work and remain committed to the organization requires addressing various factors.
A high level of employee engagement can drive prosperity and serve as a tool to attract top talent. So, you might wonder, how do I enhance employee engagement in my workplace? Before we dive into that, let’s look at what employee engagement is and why it’s so important.
What is Employee Engagement and Why Is It Important?
Employee engagement is a measure of an individual’s mental and emotional connection towards the organization they work for, their team, and their work. Employees who are engaged usually exhibit a high degree of commitment, productivity, and positive impact on the organization’s culture.
The levels of employee engagement are:
Highly engaged employees
Moderately engaged employees
Barely engaged employees
Disengaged employees
Reaching a highly engaged employee level is important as this indicates an organization is thriving, successful, and a great workplace. Maintaining a high level of engagement is crucial as it lowers absenteeism and turnover, boosts productivity and customer satisfaction, and promotes employee well-being. With that in mind, we have highlighted 14 key elements of employee engagement below.
1) Organizational Commitment
Organizational commitment is the level of loyalty an individual feels towards their job and organization. A highly committed employee has a strong connection to their team and firm and will contribute more to the organization’s success. These individuals possess a strong inclination to help their organization succeed.
The level of organizational commitment is influenced by multiple factors including job satisfaction, culture, management, and more. We will further outline some of these factors below.
2) Company Culture
Company culture reflects the norms, values, beliefs, attitudes, and standards of an organization. A company’s culture is key to employee happiness and motivates them to come to work every day. Employees are more engaged in their work when they are surrounded by a welcoming and positive environment as opposed to one that causes stress. Moreover, employees are even more engaged when their personal beliefs and values align with the company culture.
It’s imperative to recognize that ensuring cultural diversity is a key element in company culture. This underscores the company’s commitment and values towards diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). A diverse and inclusive workplace impacts employee recruitment and loyalty. With the rise of DEI, incorporating this into your company culture will foster trust, enhance reputation, nurture empowerment, and stimulate innovation.
If you find your company culture is not conducive to fostering employee engagement, it might be time to conduct a thorough analysis to pinpoint the underlying issues. Are there specific aspects missing, or is there something inherent in the culture that’s reducing employee engagement? Sometimes minor corrections to company culture might suffice and other times a complete change in culture is necessary.
3) Meaning and Purpose
As most of us can understand, finding purpose and meaning in what we do makes a tremendous difference in our careers. Thus, ensuring you provide meaningful work for your employees is a key to employee engagement. Employees who perceive their contributions as impactful are more likely to be committed to the work they do.
Demonstrating to employees the meaningfulness of their work requires communicating how their efforts contribute to the larger picture. How does their work make a positive impact on the company? It’s important to provide employees with opportunities to grow within their roles and expand the impact of their work. This will contribute to a stronger sense of purpose in the workplace.
4) Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction is one of the biggest factors contributing to employee engagement. It’s evident that an employee who isn’t happy with their job is unlikely to stay in it for long. Multiple factors contribute to job satisfaction including the work itself, the company, management, coworkers, opportunities, etc. Ensuring all of these aspects are providing sufficient benefits to the employee will help to increase satisfaction and thus the commitment to the role. We will outline some of these factors later in this blog.
5) Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the belief that businesses have a greater responsibility to society than just generating profits. CSR goes hand in hand with a company’s culture as it aligns with its values. Employees who feel strongly about CSR and its effect on the community are inclined to be more engaged if their workplace shares similar values. Conversely, if you are not engaged in CSR, you will likely see your employees exhibit a low level of engagement. Employees care about what their company is doing and value opportunities to contribute to the community in their work, whether directly or through supplementary opportunities like volunteering. Employees who can participate in CSR at their workplace are twice as engaged compared to those who can not.
6) Management/Leadership
The management and leadership in an organization is very important. Employees seek to form meaningful relationships with leadership. Those who hold their leaders in esteem are more likely to listen to them, take direction, and thus be more engaged in their work. Additionally, management plays a pivotal role in shaping company culture, promoting CSR, and other crucial aspects. Thus, ensuring a strong leadership team is very important.
A leadership team that demonstrates care for their employees, treats them with respect and values their opinion, contributes to strong employee engagement. It’s important to take a look and examine your leadership team to spot anyone who may hinder employee engagement.
7) Career Advancement Opportunities
Engaged employees place importance on learning new skills and expanding their knowledge. A company’s high-performing employees are interested in progressing within the company and finding opportunities for career advancement. If employees perceive a lack of opportunities for career advancement, they may not be motivated to invest efforts in their role. Thus, it is important to make career opportunities clear from the start. If an employee does not feel like the company will provide them with opportunities to move up, they will easily find another company that will.
Hence, it’s important to talk about promotions, learning opportunities, and more early on when hiring new employees. Demonstrating your commitment to professional development can be achieved through programs, opportunities for mentorship, conferences, courses, and more. Providing avenues for career advancement will foster commitment to the organization.
8) Flexibility
Nowadays, workplace stress is a big factor influencing an individual’s job satisfaction and commitment. Work-family conflict is a big contributor to workplace stress. With many individuals having children, parents to take care of, or other commitments, balancing work and family life can be a difficult task. Workplaces must make this easier for their employees by providing flexible options. This includes flextime and flexplace work arrangements that allow employees to work from home or to have flexible hours.
These initiatives demonstrate an organization’s concern for its employees, reflecting its values and culture which ultimately influences an employee’s satisfaction on the job and consequently their engagement.
9) Communication and Honesty
Effective communication is a key element of employee engagement. Employees crave an environment where they can communicate openly with their managers, feeling valued, involved, trusted, and listened to. If there isn’t strong communication between employees and management, there will be a lack of engagement. Communication allows employees to feel included in the firm and thus deepen their organizational commitment.
A key to communication is honesty and transparency. Employees don’t want to hear about company news through the grapevine. It is important that they can hear what is going on, good or bad, from leadership. If they feel like things are being hidden from them, they won’t feel like they are a true part of the company and this can ultimately affect how engaged and committed they are to the firm.
10) Equitable Pay
Salaries can be a very sensitive topic but it is a very important one to most employees. It’s important that employees feel fairly compensated for their work, and know what the company is looking for when considering promotions. This is important for employees looking for career advancement opportunities.
Transparency is very important when it comes to salary. Companies can achieve this by sharing salary ranges for job postings. This reinforces a culture of open communication and transparency which we have established as a key to employee engagement.
11) Recognition & Rewards
Employees are unlikely to demonstrate high levels of motivation and engagement if they aren’t recognized for the work they put in. 86% of workers admit that recognition in the workplace is a major driver of motivation.
Recognition can take various forms including thank you cards, employee of the month awards, verbal recognition, and tangible rewards or gifts. Having these positive consequences to an employee’s hard work will set a standard for what is recognized within the organization. This will act as positive reinforcement and encourage the behaviour to continue.
Developing a good rewards and recognition system allows employees to differentiate what behaviour is considered “good” and “bad” in the eyes of management.
12) Encourage Learning
It’s easy to stay stagnant in your role but there’s always so much more to learn. Employees that are committed to learning more, are likely more engaged in the work they do. A key to learning is an organization that encourages learning and provides employees with the resources to do so. Starting a B2B podcast for your company can be beneficial for employees to learn more from industry experts in your niche, while at the same time growing your business to allow for more opportunities.
This can be through offering courses, and certifications, deploying a virtual knowledge base for all employees, and simply creating a culture that promotes learning and growth. Employees who continue to learn can do their jobs more effectively. It will also demonstrate the company’s commitment to the individual’s development and not just the bottom line of the firm.
13) Digital Experience
As new technologies evolve, it becomes increasingly imperative for companies to integrate them into the workplace. Enhancing technology infrastructure facilitates a smoother and more seamless experience for employees, enabling them to focus more on their core tasks and thereby enhancing productivity.
Moreover, a robust digital experience facilitates improved digital onboarding and training functions. It also opens up opportunities for remote work, enabling employees to connect with the company from any location easily. As previously mentioned, this flexibility improves employee engagement.
Adoption of tech broadens the possibilities for a firm allowing them to make their processes more efficient and provide better resources to their employees. Especially with the younger workforce, acknowledging and incorporating modern technology will help to attract new talent and demonstrate a firm’s commitment to innovation.
14) Feedback
Feedback is crucial in any organization. For an employee to improve, they need to know what they are doing well and what can be improved on. It can be hard to give and receive constructive criticism but it is important.
Employees that actively seek feedback, are naturally more engaged in the work they do. Moreover, when firms provide effective feedback, it enables employees to refine their skills and make meaningful contributions to the organization.
Conclusion
Commitment to the organization is the end goal. A committed employee not only finds satisfaction in their job but also resonates with the values of the firm, fosters strong relationships with management, and embodies various other positive attributes. However, reaching this point will not happen overnight. It takes time and effort to solidify employee engagement across a firm. Now that we have outlined these key elements, it’s time to ask yourself, what next steps will you take to increase employee engagement in your firm?
Written by Kaitlin Duong
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Jony Studios is a client-focused media production studio offering audio/video production, B2B podcasting, and audiobook services. They have worked with a wide range of clients from small businesses to larger organizations such as Penguin Random House, Amazon, University of Waterloo, Freakonomics Radio and many others.
