A Guide to Employee Engagement: What Is It and Why It’s Important
The impact of employee engagement isn’t limited to team success. It also affects different facets of the average company, like revenue, customer experience, profitability, and employee turnover.
71% of business execs believe engaged employees offer better output, boosting the team’s success and contributing to the organization’s overall prosperity. Employees who feel a personal connection with the organization tend to go harder, stay longer and motivate less engaged teammates.
What Is Employee Engagement?
By definition, employee engagement measures how committed an employee is to help the organization achieve pre-set goals. Certainly, building a positive workplace culture influences how employees think, act, and conduct themselves on the job – and outside the workplace.
The Influence of Employee Engagement on Your Business
Improvements in Employee Productivity
Research indicates that engaged employees can be up to 17% more productive than their disengaged peers. Engaged employees commit to the cause, working diligently while also taking on discretionary responsibilities without being prompted, like choosing to get video calls outside of traditional work hours.
Decrease in Absenteeism and Churn Rate
Engaged employees invest themselves in the company and what it represents. As a result, they don’t have as much incentive to seek other jobs.
Opportunities for professional growth and due recognition are two factors that improve employee engagement numbers. Therefore, any company providing both incentives to its employees is likely to experience a proportional decrease in turnover rates.
Healthier Workplace Culture
The Symbiosis Institute of Business Management says disconnection from any task reduces the average person’s attention span – increasing the chances of workplace accidents.
Depending on your industry, workplace accidents can have serious implications like employee injuries, hefty fines, and regulatory penalties.
Conversely, an engaged employee is a more attentive worker and is less likely to make costly mistakes. Therefore, it’s always better to encourage an engagement culture in the workplace.
Higher Revenue
An engaged employee sees their core values in the company’s culture, decisions, and leadership. And in this kind of an environment, an engaged employee is likely to thrive.
A thriving group of employees is a key driver for sustained performance improvement, top-notch production, and increased profitability. Get the employee engagement numbers up, and your company’s revenue should also receive a boost.
Better Customer Engagement and Satisfaction
Companies with engaged employees tend to have highly satisfied customers. Certainly, high levels of customer satisfaction come from happy, engaged employees who care about their roles and, by extension, the customers. Engaged employees can go as far as using the best Zoom alternatives to solve customer queries.
Increase in Customer Loyalty
Certainly, satisfied customers will remain more loyal to the brand, increasing your retention numbers. Additionally, they’re more likely to tell someone else about your company’s wonderful services or products.
Who Should Be Involved, and How Can You Build Impact in Employee Engagement Planning?
The Organization Leaders and Ambassadors
These stakeholders are top advocates for employee engagement. Therefore, organization leaders need to agree on a company vision, set a tone for workplace engagement, and communicate any changes to employees.
The Human Resources
The HR department is responsible for workplace engagement initiatives and ensuring team accountability. The HR team implements engagement processes while managing any daily needs related to the cause.
The Managers
Managers are the ones who have a direct relationship with employees. Their directive is to create a working environment where each employee can feel engaged and relevant.
Additionally, the manager builds positive relationships with employees. With Bluetooth headsets and mics, they can conduct meetings where they receive employee suggestions and feedback. They also play an active role in employee growth and development.
The Employees
Employees are the major source of insight into engagement. Therefore, they provide honest, actionable comments about what needs to change regarding employee engagement.
How Employee Engagement Can Help Your Employees
Employees Enjoy Fulfillment of Professional and Personal Aspirations
Direct and objective workplace engagement translates to a healthy work-life balance for your employee. It also comes with improvements in their emotional and mental state.
Engaged employees feel valued like they’re a vital cog in a purposeful machine. This knowledge allows the average engaged employee to feel fulfilled in their work.
Employees Are Unlikely to Experience Depression and Burnout
You can never have engaged employees if you work them too hard. Ensuring your employee can have a life outside of work improves their connection to the workplace. But it also reduces employee stress levels which helps the team avoid burnout and ruts.
Employees Become Committed and Build Loyalty to Organization
Certainly, engaged employees see themselves in the company’s long-term future. Therefore, this certainty improves their commitment to helping the team grow.
Employees Experience Boost in Morale
Employee engagement can spark the creative juices in your workers — they’ll inevitably find new ways to meet those KPIs. Similarly, alignment with the company and what it stands for is a morale-boosting tonic for employees.
Some Approaches to Creating an Effective Employee Engagement Strategy
Here’s how to create an effective strategy that drives those engagement numbers up:
Identify the Main Factors of Employee Engagement
Ensure you consider these key factors while developing surveys and other engagement initiatives.
- Collaboration and communication.
- Company leadership.
- Corporate responsibility and ethics.
- Work-place culture, i.e. inclusion, work-life balance and workplace safety.
- Attitude toward customers.
- Access to workplace tools e.g using the best inventory management for Shopify.
- Work processes, growth and career progression.
Create Different Ways to Collect Employee Engagement Data
Comprehensive engagement surveys will help you understand employee engagement at the primary level. The best part is you can employ different survey forms depending on your company’s engagement situation.
Examples of employee surveys include:
- Pulse surveys.
- Lifecycle surveys.
- New hire surveys.
- Exit surveys.
- General surveys.
- Stay surveys.
Listen to Your Employees and Get Them Involved
Your employees will feel the largest impact of any engagement strategies at the end of the day. Therefore, it’s best to build company engagement strategies based on employee feedback and suggestions. Certainly, it’s always better to involve your employees in the decision-making process.
Observe and Gather Different Opinions from the Right People
It’s not enough to listen to your employee. Creating an effective engagement strategy requires you to act on feedback from the right people. QA (Quality Assurance) conferences can be a platform for critical feedback. But, which opinions do you need?
Who will be the direct recipients of the latest engagement initiative? Who is tasked with employee monitoring and supervision for the next quarter? The answers to these and related questions should determine whose opinions should affect your employee engagement strategies.
Measure Employee Engagement
Your engagement strategies are incomplete without the influence of engagement metrics and analytics. Run surveys and analyze the data using scalable platforms.
We recommend measuring engagement numbers using the following individual categories:
- Work involvement.
- Willingness to suggest the organization to others.
- Level of work involvement.
- Efforts put in outside the bare minimum.
Engaged Employees Make a Progressive Company
Sometimes, an upturn in employee engagement is the morale booster needed to take your company to the next level. Make the extra effort to ensure your employees are engaging in every aspect of your organization!
About the author:
Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated phone system for small businesses. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Jenna Bunnell also published articles for domains such as SME News and Together Platform. Check out her LinkedIn profile.
How Employee Engagement Influences Your Business
- Improves employee productivity
Engaged employees commit to the cause, working diligently while also taking on discretionary responsibilities without being prompted.
- Decreases absenteeism and churn rate
Engaged employees invest themselves in the company and what it represents. As a result, they don’t have as much incentive to seek other jobs.
- Contributes to a healthier workplace culture
An engaged employee is a more attentive worker and is less likely to make costly mistakes. Therefore, it’s always better to encourage an engagement culture in the workplace.
- Increases revenue
An engaged employee sees their core values in the company’s culture, decisions, and leadership. And in this kind of an environment, an engaged employee is likely to thrive.
- Improves customer engagement and satisfaction
High levels of customer satisfaction come from happy, engaged employees who care about their roles and, by extension, the customers.
- Increases customer loyalty
Satisfied customers will remain more loyal to the brand, increasing your retention numbers.
