Today’s guest blogger is Lucy Saysell, marketing executive with SourceBreaker. SourceBreaker is a completely new category of recruitment technology. It’s an end-to-end search platform that searches across your CRM, CV databases and social media, uncovering candidates your consultants and competitors cannot currently find, having an instant impact on billings.
Employee engagement is one of those essential workplace attitudes that is so vital and yet often overlooked. Get it right and your team will be happy to come to work, motivated and giving their all. Get it wrong or totally ignore it and you will soon begin to see negativity and even apathy creeping into the workplace culture.
When your employees work hard, your business does well. This means that you need to prioritise the staff feel-good factor or face the consequences. Your business can only be run effectively and make good profits when productivity is high.
The benefits of having motivated staff
When your staff are motivated and engaged in the right way, there are multiple benefits to be had. They are in general more:
- Productive
- Well-motivated
- Happy with their jobs
- Fresh and energised
- Full of innovative ideas
- Likely to take far less sick days
- Ready to help boost the company’s profits
Global employee disengagement
Sadly, however engagement does not come naturally. Look around and you will see a huge amount of people – up to 78% – with the dreaded Monday morning feeling. The worst thing is, this starts on a Sunday night. Life really is too short to spend so much time doing something you dislike. If this could apply to your staff, then you need to look at ways in which you can increase efficiency by enhancing employee engagement.
It would be fair to say that disengagement has hit high levels with 13% of employees around the world suffering from this plight. The result is having staff that watch the clock, yearning for the time when they can leave work to go home. You end up paying salaries for little return so profits start to sink. Things like poor management, lack of training, poor pay and few incentives can all come together to create a working environment that can become toxic.
How to enhance your employee engagement
So now you know the consequences of lack of engagement, what can you do to promote it? There are many ways and you may come up with a few of your own. Also look at companies that you admire with smiley, happy staff and look at what they do; there is no harm in copying a few of their techniques. In the meantime, you could try out the following:
- Let your employees know you care by spending time with them – findings clearly show that when leaders spend more time with their team, results improve. When Google reviewed their own performance data, it proved that when managers spent more time communicating, the upshot was enhanced engagement. And it doesn’t have to be formal either; whilst coaching and training is good, going out for lunch or chatting also does the trick.
- Encourage emotional commitment – your employees need to be emotionally engaged as well as physically. They do this when they find personal meaning in the work that they do. This can be whatever floats their boat i.e. a recruitment company employee hitting targets and knowing they have done well. Reaching goals boosts morale for everyone involved. You can even give little prizes such as attain this target and receive a box of chocolates or cappuccinos all round for everyone in the office, bought by the manager.
Once you get the idea of what works and see which techniques respond to best, you can add more. Also consider offering flexi-time so that employees can plan their working hours around their personal life. Even set up an ‘Ideas Box’ that staff can drop a piece of paper into with their employee engagement idea written on it.
Do all of this and more and it won’t be long before employee morale and engagement is on the up, along with your company’s results.
