“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. Take care of your employees, and they will take care of the clients.”
This statement rightfully reflects the very objective of how important it is to engage your employees.
Let’s dig more into it.
Employee engagement is a 360-degree approach that drives workforce performance. It defines the nature of the relationship between an organization and its workforce. To clarify, the relationship neither means being cordial nor does it mean being respectful to each other. Whereas, the relationship actually signifies how an organization absorbs the employees and how he/she is enthusiastic about the work.
Experts contend that the most ideal scenario arises when the goals of the organization and its workforce move in the same direction.
This alignment of goals fosters a positive impact on the organization. The employees take proper care of their values. Whereas, a disengaged employee may put less effort at work, or lacks the motivation to uplift a company’s reputation.
With a successful engagement process, the entire workforce feels passionate about their jobs. They feel committed towards the betterment of the organization and put discretionary effort to maximize productivity.
Truly, an organization with “high” employee engagement outperforms those with “low” employee engagement.
Here is something interesting for you – a set of questions that will help you evaluate your Company Goals Vs Workforce Engagement.
Try to discover the answers to these questions.
- What are your organization’s goals and visions?
- Are your employees aware of the goals?
- Do the employees foresee or realize how their work ultimately contributes to the success of the organization?
- What is the role of the leadership of top management to motivate and encourage the employees?
One of the key factors to achieving success in business depends on the level of engagement you want to activate. If you are clear with the answers, you have won half the battle. You just need to connect the dots.
So, essentially, it is crucial to engage your employees to meet workplace challenges. It can have pretty miraculous effects on your organization and make it an awesome destination to work.
Here are some key points:
Employee Motivation
Employees are the most important pillar of success. Thus, it is quintessential to engage your workforce who will elevate its status. Without them, an organization cannot operate smoothly.
For instance, here are a couple of notes. Check this out,
“In an organization, employees make the difference. And one of the prominent members of the workforce is You, John! Thank you for making a significant upliftment in the work culture”
“You’re a rock star performer! We appreciate your recent accomplishments. Thanks for bringing the energy to the workplace.”
These appreciation notes go a long way in boosting the morale of the employees. Along with it, a well-structured reward and incentive program further improves the encouragement process.
Essentially, employee engagement enhances motivation among employees that boosts productivity and helps to yield better ROI.
Increased Productivity
Engaged Workforce = Increased Productivity.
Organizations expect optimum productivity from their employees irrespective of their designation. They must adopt viable strategies to keep them motivated to work harder and smarter.
When employees feel appreciated, they naturally go the extra mile to achieve the targets. They accomplish their tasks faster and their capacity to finish work also increases. In fact, if you take care of your employees, they will find their work meaningful and will also put adequate efforts.
Increased Revenue
Employee engagement certainly increases your revenue. Various reports reflect that a minimal effort to engage your employees will lead to a 2x increase in revenue.
How does it happen?
Well, Happy Employees leads to Happier Customers. To improve your customer service, it is mandatory to increase the employee engagement level.
Take care of your employees so that they apply for fewer leaves, are more attentive and friendly. All the things required for building good customer relationships are achievable by encouraging the employees to go that extra mile.
Such employees are also great advocates and always put the company’s best face forward.
Achieving Company Goals
Every organization has unique sets of goals and value systems. Aligning employees with the company goals gives them a clear perspective of what the company wants to achieve. Thus, employees have a better sense of teamwork and they dedicate their energy towards the betterment of the organization. In fact, they put immense effort to achieve business goals and are less likely to leave the organization.
Now to achieve a set goal, you have to align the employees with the organization’s goals and value systems.
Here is how you can do it:
- Define the primary goals, foresee the end results, and have an organized strategy to execute it.
- Hold timely meetings to explain the goals to the employee.
- Conduct interactive sessions to bring more insights to the table.
- Communicate with the employees regularly and keep updating on the progress.
Higher Employee Satisfaction
The importance of knowing the subtle difference between employee satisfaction and employee engagement is critical for an organization. It helps to make strategic decisions and creates a better work culture.
Employee satisfaction is simply how content or satisfied employees are with their jobs. It is a byproduct of an effective employee engagement process.
If your employees blend themselves with the work culture, then their work satisfaction will automatically fall in place. And, the factors that influence employee satisfaction include compensation, flexibility, workload, teamwork, perceptions of management, resources, etc.
Not only do these practices keep their employees happy, but they also reduce turnover and improve retention.
Employee Loyalty
Employee Loyalty is a two-way situation. A relationship of mutual respect and trust is mandatory if you want your employees to be loyal to the company. You must increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions.
Especially in today’s job market, companies are striving to find ways to enhance loyalty amongst their employees. With a well-organized engagement program, they can actually solve it to a great extent.
Having discussed the advantages of engaging your employees more and more, now it’s time to look into the strategies that Captivate the workforce to an optimum level
“An employee engagement program is about creating relationships where employees feel passionate, energetic, and committed towards their work”
The ideal situation arises when an organization encourages its employees to involve themselves in the growth of the brand.
The workforce will definitely do their bit for the betterment of the company if they experience that you;
- Recognize their efforts
- Work to remove barriers and red tapes in the organization
- Allow free-flow of communication
Let’s focus on the Strategies that Helps to Enhance the Engagement Process
Employee Recognition
Employee Recognition is a way to acknowledge the employees for their hard work, dedication, and accomplishments in the organization.
Recognizing the employees is an important activity that every business must pursue. It is paramount in the workplace as it creates a happy work environment. It also registers a sense of belongingness and closeness too.
Nowadays, entrepreneurs do believe in employee recognition programs as it drives a better return on investment. Some of the advantages of employee recognition are as follows:
- Alignment with the company’s goals
- Greater job satisfaction
- Boosts team spirit
- Lowers attrition rates
- Reduces absenteeism
- Increases productivity
- Builds greater employer brand
Also, start an Employee Reward and Incentive Program. Acknowledging the employees for their exceptional work, and rewarding them, boosts their morale and help the business grow.
Here are 5 fundamental steps to initiate an employee recognition program:
- Identify why you need to engage your employees
- Determine the rewards you want to deliver
- Make a fair selection of the candidate
- Select the award
- Announce the program and start it
Employee Gamification
Using gamification, an organization can make even the most tedious tasks interesting. Gamification helps to engage your employees through active participation.
By creating a variety of contests, you, tend to increase employee participation. The announcement of contests itself builds excitement among employees. When task completion links with rewards, employees find that extra encouragement to perform.
Developing contests and sweepstakes is one idea that has been in the limelight since ages. And it still works.
Training and Development
Employees are a company’s biggest asset. Investing in those talents is quintessential to sustainable business growth. Dedicated training and development programs foster employee engagement and are critical to the company’s financial performance.
As the business landscape becomes increasingly competitive, improving your team’s performance is necessary within evolving markets. Thus, employees prefer to stay at a company longer if it invests in their career development.
Here are some benefits of training and development in the workplace:
- Successful employee retention
- Empowering the employees
- Training future leaders
- Increase workplace engagement
Offer Employees an Experience
Employee engagement and employee experiences blend with one another; you cannot have one without the other.
For instance, if the employees perform a great job, appreciate them with a personal message. Congrats them on their work anniversary. This will help every employee to feel important.
Proper Communication
Top-level management must start with these four aspects: involvement, interaction, connection, and influence.
Involve your employees through every communication channel. It will lead to interaction and build a level of connection that is similar to that of a good friend. Once you have achieved these four objectives, you reinforce long-term engagement, loyalty, and advocacy towards your business.
Workplace Environment
A healthy workplace environment is ideal for the company as it could lead to generating sales for the business. A better workplace environment improves productivity and reduces costs related to absenteeism, attrition, workers’ compensation, and such.
Companies have their own corporate culture that determines its value. Based on the same, it usually creates a standard protocol that employees follow.
Now, when you have created an ideal work culture, the environment tends to be healthier; as, in a general sense, everyone would have nothing to be unhappy about.
Let’s discuss some methods that can entice the workforce to maintain a proper work environment.
Fair employee policy: The company must maintain an unbiased employee policy regardless of the designation in the company. If your policy changes, ensure everyone is well aware of it.
Team building activities: Team building activities bring employees closer and also motivate them to create a positive workplace environment. These activities help improve internal communication and help employees know each other better.
We, at NextBee, have introduced a state-of-the-art employee engagement & recognition platform that delivers great results in terms of enhancing productivity and thereby giving a boost to the revenue model. The solution integrates with any in-house and 3rd party software applications.
Now, let’s explore some of the key features of the platform that can manage all the activities.
- Engage your employees at every touchpoint
- Drive more referrals and help in the perfect hire
- Seamless onboarding
- Gamification modules that encourage employees to participate more
- Keep track of the activities
- Personalized rewards system
- Zero commission on rewards
- Platform powered by machine learning
- Robust and scalable system
- Option to integrate with other software systems
- Multiple Touchpoints for Program Access including portal integrated, landing page, email, receipts, mobile app and more
- Robust Admin Dashboard
- Rich data analytics and dedicated data analyst support
- Program modeling, hypothesis testing, and ongoing optimization
NextBee offers a range of impressive functionalities that are less likely to be found in other traditional solutions. The Artificial Intelligence engine gives a never-seen experience to engage your employees and to boost their productivity.
With NextBee, companies and entrepreneurs are most likely to see their productive employees as a good resource and an asset for the organization. The platform will open up a new window of opportunities for both employees and employers.
In fact, the solution fosters transparency and accountability for teams to increase employee recognition, improve retention, and drive performance. It helps to manage and optimize employee engagement journeys – journeys where the workforce determines what comes next for them based on program engagement data.
To conclude, it is quite evident to say that employee engagement drives better performance. Companies with an engaged workforce outperform the competition in terms of overall productivity and revenue generation.
Thus, with a 24×7 dedicated support and account management team based in the USA, NextBee is the one-stop solution to all business needs. Feel free to contact us for a detailed discussion on the employee recognition software.