Employee engagement strategies are crucial for organizations looking to get the most from their people. When employees buy into the company’s mission and vision, value the people they work with, and enjoy the role they’re in, productivity soars. Discretionary effort also increases—meaning employees tend to go that extra mile for your business.
Yet even the most compassionate, committed leaders struggle to keep a finger on their organization’s pulse. According to Jeanie Duck, an expert in change management, managers and senior leaders cannot accurately measure employee engagement through observation alone.
As such, it can be challenging to implement effective employee engagement strategies. After all, how can you change what you can’t identify?
In this blog, you’ll learn how to identify disengaged employees and implement strategies to improve engagement.
4 Effective Employee Engagement Strategies
There are many ways to think about employee engagement and here are four potential employee engagement strategies.
Chart a Personalized Development Path for Your Employees
According to a recent report focused on the relationship between management and employees, the lack of career-growth opportunities is one of the leading drivers of employee turnover. Poor career pathing isn’t just causing disengagement; it’s causing people to outright quit.
If an employee isn’t loving their role or is underperforming in it, it’s easy to consider an improvement plan. Instead, consider a different approach. Take time to explore where your employee sees themself in your organization. What department would that be? What would that job entail?
Explore which jobs would play to your employees’ natural strengths. Then set a development plan in motion. Not only can this improve employee engagement in a current position—it can turn a low performer into a star player in the long term.
Learn more about how to create a personalized development plan.
Improve Manager-employee Relationships with Awareness
Just as employees have unique behavioral drives and needs, they also have preferred work and communication styles. Some enjoy face-to-face interactions and speaking off the cuff. Others prefer to take time to reflect and communicate any ideas via email or Slack.
From a manager’s perspective, understanding how employees prefer to work and communicate can be the difference between a poor manager-employee relationship and a great one.
The Predictive Index Relationship Guide™ is a powerful tool that gets to the heart of this dynamic. Using the results of the PI Behavioral Assessment™, the Relationship Guide teaches managers and direct reports on how to better interact with one another.
The Relationship Guide is a useful way to jump-start conversations and strengthen communication. It’s also a tool that managers can use to tailor their leadership to fit their employees’ behavioral needs.
By better understanding their behavioral drives, managers can bridge the gap between them and their employees.
Plan a Team-building “Outing”
Due to the social restrictions caused by COVID-19, team outings are no longer an option. Have you considered a virtual team-building exercise? Virtual gatherings are a great way to build trust among team members and assess current team dynamics.
These virtual outings can range in activity from wine tastings to team lunches. The important part is taking time away from work to do something fun and out of the ordinary.
By taking the time to step away from work, you accomplish two things. One, you show your employees that you’re invested in their development and that of the team. Two, you explore what your team does well—and what can be improved.
If you know a specific team member is having trouble fitting in, take this outing as an opportunity to bridge that relationship gap. At best, you may return from your “excursion” with a unified team. At worst, you’ve identified an opportunity to reconfigure your team and optimize your talent.
Build a Culture of Diversity and Inclusion
One way to avoid alienating employees at your organization is to ensure you have a culture that rewards diversity of opinion and background.
As the workforce becomes increasingly diverse, it’s important to have an employee base that’s just as varied. There’s also a clear business reason to do so: Studies show diverse and inclusive teams are more productive than homogeneous ones.
But inclusion means more than just hiring and celebrating underrepresented groups. It means designing your organization in a way that makes everyone feel like a valued contributor.
It means having video conferencing tools—like Zoom and Meeting Owl—to accommodate all employees. It means encouraging employees to include their pronouns on Slack in support of LGBTQIA+ employees. It means ensuring there’s a clear path for minorities to become managers and senior leaders.
At the end of the day, creating a diverse and inclusive culture isn’t just a human resources responsibility. It’s an effort that’ll involve everyone at your organization.
Master Employee Engagement Strategies and Boost Productivity
Measuring employee engagement may be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be impossible. Employ these employee engagement strategies, and help create a more engaged workforce.
Want to discover how engaged your employees are? Find out using a tool like the PI Employee Experience Survey™.
This easy-to-administer survey measures how engaged your employees are and identifies what’s driving engagement—and disengagement—at your organization. Rather than applying broad engagement strategies, you can focus on the few that will have the most positive impact on your workforce.
The result will be more highly engaged employees and increased productivity and profitability.
Olivier Aries is the VP of professional services at The Predictive Index.
