People view work much differently in the Digital Age than in past eras. Technology has made a profound impact on the workplace. Instead of working to live, many people pursue vocations to expand their skill sets, fuel their passions, and improve as human beings.
Not surprisingly, this shift has disrupted the workplace and forced companies to reevaluate their operations from the ground up. If you want your employees to love working for your business, you must prioritize the employee experience. Workers want work-life synergy these days, not just work-life balance.
Below, Poised will show you how to boost employee engagement and synergy in the months and years ahead!
What Is Employee Engagement?
While they are often thrown together, employee satisfaction, happiness, and well-being do not equate to employee engagement. Employee engagement refers to employees’ mental and emotional connection to their company, teams, and job roles.
In other words, it measures the way an employee feels about their organization. There are several levels of employee engagement, and the profile each employee falls into depends on how they perceive their workplace.
For example, highly engaged employees think about the world of their workplace. This means they feel strongly connected to their jobs and teams, and they generally have positive emotions toward their company. This translates into the employees going the extra mile to help the company reach its goals.
Moderately engaged employees think somewhat favorably of their workplace. They generally like the organization but have opinions on how it can improve. Moderately engaged employees are likely to underperform (even if slightly) and probably will not ask for extra responsibilities or advancement opportunities.
Barely engaged employees are indifferent at best — and apathetic at worst — toward their job. They often come to work without the motivation to perform tasks outside of the bare minimum. Sometimes, they will even do less than required. Because barely engaged employees might be looking for jobs elsewhere, they are considered a high turnover risk.
The least desirable employees are those that are disengaged. Disengaged employees have an overall negative opinion of their workplace and are entirely disconnected from the company’s mission, goals, and future.
Not only are they unmotivated, but they also lack a commitment to their duties. If they are not managed effectively, their negative perceptions and actions can harm their team’s productivity and engagement.
What Is Synergy in Business?
Synergy happens when various participants work together toward common goals. In business, this cooperative interaction refers to teamwork between different departments (or even businesses) that combine their efforts and talents to make a greater impact.
In other words, synergy can be summed up as “cooperation” and “working together.” For collaboration to be effective among your teams, it’s critical to cultivate synergy. This can be challenging because so many factors are involved, including personalities, skill sets, talents, and competing priorities.
How To Increase Employee Engagement
So, how exactly do you improve employee engagement in your organization? Here are a few tried-and-true tips to consider:
Integrate Your Mission and Values
Most employees want to know their company has a purpose within their employees, community, and industry. It’s not enough to list your mission statement on your website and in job descriptions. You must incorporate your values and vision into your daily operations and cultivate a meaningful work environment.
Employees are much more likely to feel inspired and engaged in their work when they see the company’s core values at play. Employees want to feel like they are part of a bigger picture when they come to work each day.
Improve Onboarding
Any organization's onboarding process sets the tone for how new employees perceive the business and their role. Don’t waste the opportunity to welcome employees the right way by connecting them with your company’s mission, values, and vision.
You can share your unique company culture during the onboarding process and show new workers the importance of their roles on the team and in the company vision. Strategize the process to convey any information related to each employee’s role and establish expectations for collaboration with team members.
Train Your Team Members
More than any other reason, employees pursue new jobs because there is a lack of opportunity for career growth in their current ones. It’s vital to create a clear advancement path for your team members. It will help your employees remain engaged and productive, and it will also boost recruitment and retention.
Don’t give your team a reason to seek growth opportunities elsewhere; instead, encourage and incentivize them to develop within your company.
Give (and Receive) Feedback
Internal communication is vital to all companies. Employees generally feel good about their workplaces when there is effective internal communication. This is because they feel heard and recognized, and they are well informed about their teams and company as a whole. This leads to them working well with others and coming to the office with genuine enthusiasm.
Ensure that your employees have a safe channel to share feedback honestly and demonstrate that their leadership team knows precisely what is occurring within the business. This can be in the form of pulse surveys, 1:1 check-ins, and more.
Most importantly, find ways to show that you genuinely care about your team members and their concerns. If your company models an open communication platform from the top down, your workers will remain transparent about their engagement and regularly seek feedback.
Why Is Employee Engagement Important?
HR professionals care about employee engagement initiatives because they foster job satisfaction, happiness, employee retention, professional development, and recruitment. But employee engagement goes much further than Human Resources.
Employee engagement affects every person involved in an organization — from new hires to teams to the company as a whole. Discretionary effort naturally rises when employees are engaged because they genuinely desire to go above and beyond their job requirements. When this energy and effort is channeled in the right direction, it will positively impact many business outcomes.
Here are a few of the many benefits of high employee engagement:
- Increased employee productivity
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Lower absenteeism
- Higher employee retention
- Healthier employees
How You Define Your Company Culture Matters. Here’s Why.
While there are many definitions for company culture, it essentially refers to the way you do what you do in the workplace. It combines your systems, behaviors, and values to create an all-encompassing employee and customer experience. Company culture involves formal and informal systems and behaviors.
It’s essential to define your company culture and live it each day because it will significantly increase employee engagement, retention, and recruitment. It will also foster innovation among your team and improve customer service. Moreover, healthy company culture will almost certainly result in higher profitability.
Why Remote Work Can Save Your Business
The pandemic has inspired businesses to convert to (or at least consider) a remote or hybrid work model. As more of the workforce demands remote work, leaders are discovering even more reasons it can benefit a struggling company. Remote work may become a vital component of combatting disengagement and extending the employee lifecycle.
Here are two of the best reasons to incorporate remote work:
Prioritize the Work-Life Balance
Today, more employees are expecting a work-life balance from their jobs. The days of working a 9-to-5 are becoming less desirable to much of the workforce as technological integrations have made it possible to perform many jobs remotely.
Allowing your team members to work remotely can significantly benefit your business, even in a hybrid arrangement. It will boost employee retention and recruitment, and it will also keep your workers happy and healthy. And we all know that can translate to higher engagement and better performance!
Promotes Employee Well-Being
Most companies genuinely care about the well-being of their employees, but what is your company doing to prove it? Incorporating remote work into your business functions allows employees to spend more time setting and fulfilling their health and wellness goals.
Preventing corporate burnout and helping employees come to work as their best selves fosters a high-performance environment. It also helps reduce employee turnover.
Clear Communication
Few things are as important to a healthy organization as cultivating a communicative environment. If your company constantly looks for ways to improve communication among your teams and departments, you can more efficiently accomplish your goals and drive innovation.
Clear communication is one of the essential drivers of employee engagement that fosters collaboration and improves employee performance.
Improving Employee Communication
Perhaps the most practical step you can take to boost employee communication is regularly hosting team meetings. However, it’s not enough to schedule meetings haphazardly. Always have a clear agenda when asking to meet over video or in person.
If an employee attends a meeting just to receive information that could have gotten over email, they will leave frustrated and feel like it was a waste of time — because it was. Schedule regular meetings with your team, but prepare thoroughly beforehand so that everyone knows the information and ideas that will be covered.
Also, think of how your team members can improve their communication with one another during video meetings. Many factors are involved in conducting a successful virtual meeting, including how employees use their equipment, how effectively they verbally and non-verbally communicate, and much more.
Consider using a tool like Poised, which will give your employees real-time feedback on their video performance, analyzing metrics from camera position to the use of filler words to your employees’ level of confidence.
Customer Experience: Clear Expectations
It’s also important that your team understands how they should contribute to the overall customer experience. After all, the people are the backbone of an organization, but its customers are its lifeblood.
For example, any time an employee talks to a customer, they should use a friendly and inviting tone, even if the customer is calling, writing, or taking to social media to complain about a product or service.
Also, use positive language across platforms and go above and beyond to understand why each customer is contacting your support team. Above all, communicate clearly with your customers and prioritize solving their problems. You might be surprised by how often a lack of communication is the culprit behind a poor customer experience.
The Bottom Line: Engaged Employees and Happy Employees
We discussed earlier how employee satisfaction is not the same as employee engagement. Happiness refers to a short-term feeling that rapidly changes depending on circumstances. Many times, an employee’s happiness has little to do with their job.
With that said, the benefits of employee engagement cannot be overstated. A highly engaged workforce is much more likely to be happy. There is an innate desire in all of us to be valued for our work and to work toward meaningful goals. By creating employee engagement programs at your company, you will see your employees become happier and produce their best work.
Consider the information and advice above as you develop employee engagement strategies and action plans to boost synergy among your teams. Remember to use any communication software that can help you achieve your mission and goals.
Sources:
Employee Engagement : Journal of Public Health Management and Practice | JPHMP
Measuring the Benefits of Employee Engagement | MIT
Employee Engagement - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
