Improving Employee Engagement

Building a great team doesn’t stop the hiring stage. Once you’ve assembled an impressive roster of talent, you have to get the most productive you can out of your efforts. This involves keeping your workers engaged.  

Motivated and dedicated employees will get more done. It’s as simple as that. But, beyond the simple improvements in productivity, active worker engagement provides other benefits. Your highly-charged team will create more innovative solutions to problems, fueling advancement, and future growth. 

All this makes engagement a crucial concern for any manager. But how do you achieve this? Here are a few tips for getting your workers more involved: 

Treat Employees as Individuals  

There is a tendency in corporate environments to treat all employees the same. They become interchangeable functionaries in a bureaucracy. That’s a policy almost designed to diminish employee engagement.  

As such, try to avoid this as much as possible. Of course, you need to set policies and maintain fairness in HR procedures. However, within this framework, you should still find areas where you can treat employees as individuals. Let them know they are valued for their particular contributions, and not just as a warm body. 

Offer Flexibility  

Employees can lose focus if they are distracted by outside concerns. If their work schedule prevents them from fulfilling their responsibilities, it can lead to disengagement. You can counteract this with a flexible schedule.  

This policy might seem like a recipe for hurting productivity. That’s a short-sighted view. On the contrary, opening up possibilities for telecommuting or unusual schedules can provide just the work/life balance needed to energize a team member. 

Promote Teamwork  

Humans are inherently social creatures. They will become more interested in their work if they know their efforts help those around them. Meanwhile, toiling alone, without understanding the value of a job well done, leads to uninspired performance.  

Promote teamwork as much as possible. Group projects will stimulate that social instinct, and will often lead to better outcomes in the long run. 

Provide Frequent (Constructive) Communication  

Teamwork creates horizontal engagement, meaning that employees become connected with their coworkers. However, you also want to promote vertical engagements. This means forming relationships between management and the people they supervise.  

Communication forms the basis of this process. Encourage a back-and-forth with your employees, making sure to keep the tone constructive at all times. It allows for constant improvement while also providing a more energizing atmosphere. 

Encourage Feedback 

It’s important to underline here that communication should go in both directions. You should provide constructive feedback and create social bonds with your workers. However, you should also encourage them to share their ideas with you.  

This communication provides the benefit of new perspectives and potentially unexpected insights. At the same time, you deepen the connection between the team member and the company, leading to a more engaged situation. 

Build Social Connections  

This focus on communication shouldn’t be limited to working hours. If you can create a personal relationship with your employees, and promote connections between them, you make your team more dynamic and more engaged.  

As such, look for opportunities to bring people together. Host happy hours and company parties. Get people to mingle and to have fun. You’ll be rewarded with a more energized and productive workforce. 

Engaging your workers gets more comfortable when you have enthusiastic and ambitious team members. By teaming with a reliable recruiting partner, like SmartTalent, you are better able to find the right workers to take your business to the next level. 

Contact SmartTalent today to learn more.