Employee engagement is an integral part of every modern-day organization. It has a massive impact on overall employee productivity and performance, and motivates the team to make substantial progress in improving the bottom-line.

If you are relatively new to the concept, here is a quick recap of what employee engagement is all about.

It is an approach that successful organizations implement in their system to motivate their staff. The idea is to align individual goals with organizational goals and perform at optimum efficiency.

Employee engagement tracking also helps you identify the extent to which the workforce is invested in their job and how much effort they are putting in to achieve their goals. It has been historically proven that engaged employees are more motivated and productive as compared to others.

Impact of Employee Engagement on Employee Productivity

Even today, many organizations focus on deadline strategy instead of employee engagement solutions to get results. However, they do often forget to focus on an essential part of the job – enthusiasm. No employee can ever contribute to their optimum capacity if they are not enthusiastic about coming to work.

So, to build that connection with your people, and prevent them from being disengaged at work, understand the impact that engagement has on employee performance.

Job Satisfaction: When employees are satisfied with their job, they come to work with a positive outlook and encourage other employees to improve their overall performance.

Customer Experiences: Every organization focuses on having a customer-centric approach, and with proper customer engagement tools to increase employee productivity, you can improve that aspect of your business.

Employees treat customers in the same way you treat them. So, a happy workforce equals delighted customers leading to the success of your business.

Better Results at Work: When a job gets monotonous, employees tend to lose their focus. An employee engagement platform keeps them engaged and allows them to change their approach to attain workplace goals.

Breaking the monotony gives way to innovation, and thus your people never get bored of coming to work.

Best Practices for Employee Productivity

Now that we have a clear idea about the impact employee engagement can have on your team’s effectiveness, it is time to look at some of the best practices you can follow to engage your people effectively.

Remember, employee engagement strategies focus on culture, leadership, training, development, and performance. That means employee engagement can give you all the pieces of a puzzle and develop your team on a holistic scale.

Here is a list of best practices that you can follow:

Inspire:

As discussed previously, inspiration is a must when one comes to the office. However, employee engagement sets grounds for intrinsic motivation.

Ignite their intrinsic motivation by telling them how important they are in the grand scheme of things and how their contributions pay dividends in the future. When they feel valued beyond money and fame, they will enjoy what they do and feel inspired to move forward themselves.

The Harrods Case of Increasing Employee Productivity

Harrods is a globally recognized brand with over 1 million square feet of selling space and 3330 departments. The brand has luxury, service, innovation, and sensation in its core values and has been in business for 160 years.

When Qatar Holdings purchased Harrods, they were committed to working with all 4000+ employees effectively.

The new management conducted a comprehensive survey to know the employees’ thoughts, and after careful observation, they realized what all their employees wanted from the company. The first survey led to the development in four significant aspects, namely:

• Changes in organizational structure
• Change in leadership
• Pride in existing brand values
• Improvement in communications

The organization has had more surveys in the future, and the employees’ suggestions have been implemented in the organization.

Today, 91% of the employees feel proud of working with the brand, and their attrition rate has dropped by 50% in the past five years.

Flexibility:

Life isn’t smooth sailing, and even the HR professionals know that. So, why ignore this when dealing with your people at work?

To engage your people effectively, you should embrace the fact that life is complicated and that sometimes employees can have a bad time outside their work life.

To build a motivated and productive team, whether in-house or remote, be flexible when dealing with such situations and not be rigid if their personal lives disrupt their work. Nobody wants to work in a place that wouldn’t allow them to leave an hour early someday due to unforeseen circumstances or asks them to miss personal occasions.

Incorporate a tad more flexibility in your culture and make your employees feel comfortable, not just in the office but also outside of work. A little flexibility can go a long way to ensure high employee productivity.

Development:

While the ‘Art of War’ was a big thing in the past, the ‘Art of Development’ is the way of the future. The latest HR trends always point towards leadership and employee development.

While many want to do a job, others wish to learn more and build up their careers as leaders.

Identify these talented people, nurture them, and train them to become leaders of tomorrow. Moreover, they will start taking ownership of their actions, and you will get homegrown managers who understand the business altogether.

Although offering development opportunities can be time-consuming and expensive, you can choose specific people to invest in. Assign small budgets to develop these selected individuals and let their managers and HR personnel work towards their growth.

The more opportunities an employee has, the more invested they will be in their work, and higher the employee engagement, better the employee productivity.

Diversity:

The race is not the only criteria for diversity. In fact, different backgrounds based on gender, personalities, financials, age, and education are some of the other prominent features of diversity at work.

How does it benefit you? To grow as a brand, you will have to cater to people with different backgrounds. Having a diverse team brings all the perspectives together and increase the efficacy of your operations.

When you hire, mentor, and manage the performances of people from diverse backgrounds, you set up your company to ascend to a global scale.

Hyatt’s Outstanding Employee Engagement Strategy

Hyatt is known for its constant efforts towards employee development and promotion. The brand has developed several strategies in the past to keep its employees satisfied at work.

The brand has a much lower employee turnover rate in the hospitality industry, and an average Hyatt employee stays with the company for around 12 years. It can be attributed to a multitude of reasons. These include:

• Tangible perks for employees like discount coupons, on-site meals at the company’s restaurants
• Regular training programs on addressing and managing guests properly
• Reimbursement of training programs fees
• Offering a place to work for the LGBT community
• Hiring diverse teams with people from different races
• Transparency when hiring candidates
• Empowering employees by giving them opportunities to make decisions and take responsibility

All in all, Hyatt knows the connection between engaged employees, employee productivity and business success. They not just say but do things to engage their people regularly. By making engagement a part of their foundation, they have created a loyal workforce and a rewarding work-culture that generates an outstanding ROI.

Takeaway

Employee engagement can be challenging, and when you factor in the best practices, you will have a lot on your plate.

But don’t be overwhelmed as there is a way to automate the entire process and not burden your HR teams with manual work.

NextBee offers a robust, AI-powered Employee engagement platform that organizes data from different CRM, POS, and automation platforms into a single dashboard to give your detailed analytics about which strategies can work best to increase employee productivity.

It also gives you detailed reports about employees’ performance both individually and as a team. This helps you identify the most hard-working employees and lets you shortlist candidates who can become a part of training and development programs.

Get started with employee engagement activities today. To know more about our platform, get in touch with our experts over a free consultation today.