What is Employee Engagement And How Can You Improve It?

Keeping Employees Engaged and Ready to Work

As an employer, you always want to make sure that your workers are fully engaged in the work they are doing. Disinterested and unmotivated employees can not only cause work delays but can really affect the bottom line of a business. Let’s take a look at an employee engagement definition and what it means for your company.

What is Employee Engagement?

For all intents and purposes, employee engagement means the relationship that an employee has with your business. This means the emotional and intellectual investment that the employee is or is willing to make in the business. Or in other words, what kind of stake or investment has the employee made in the business and more importantly the work that they are doing. An engaged employee is someone who is actively doing their work with passion and helping to improve not only their department but the company as a whole.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the disengaged employee who is not invested or passionately working on their assignments and functions. This type of employee can not only hurt your company’s overall reputation but can significantly damage your company’s economic health. So what can you do to keep employees engaged?

How Engaged are Your Employees?

You can’t really get to your destination if you don’t have a good idea of where you are. When it comes to employee engagement you need to do some research to see where everyone currently stands. This can be done by simply talking to employees about their workloads, the type of work they do, and their general satisfaction with their work.

Now sometimes you won’t get the answers you’re really searching for if you send in a manager or high-level employee as the workers may only give answers that they think you want to hear. So it’s a good idea to let them know this feedback is completely confidential and to find someone that doesn’t hold a high-level title to speak with the employees. Hiring a 3rd party consulting firm is also an option, but can get expensive.

Another option is to send out a confidential survey to all of your employees and ask questions directed at employee engagement. Whatever the results are, you will at least have some knowledge as to where you stand in regard to employee engagement.

Improving Employee Engagement

Creating an atmosphere of employee engagement involves more than pizza parties and after-work socials, although that can help in certain instances. Employee engagement can be a complex issue and each employee may need to be engaged differently. One of the first things you want to consider is providing employees with a clear sense of direction. You want them to know where the company is headed and what that means to their specific position in the company. Talk about the competitors, the economic climate, and what your company does well.

Another consideration is compensation and advancement possibilities. You want to make sure that your compensation is fair in the industry you’re involved in and also that there is a clear and well-defined path to being promoted.

A third spoke to the employee engagement wheel is communication. Your company’s internal communication is paramount to your overall success. Employees need to hear from the company often and know what’s going on internally as well as outside the company. This alone can greatly increase employee engagement.

The old adage of an engaged employee is a productive employee is very true. Keeping employees engaged involves finding out where the issues are and correcting them as quickly as possible.