Today we’re going to talk about something a little bit different from our usual topics. We usually focus on customers and customer experience. What can you do to maximize customer experience, how to retain customers, customer satisfaction, etc., etc.

Today we want to shift our focus a little and talk about Employee Engagement and how that can affect your business just as much as customer experience. 

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is approaching the workplace in a way that creates the right environment for all employees of the organization to be motivated to contribute to the organization’s success. It encourages employees to give their best on a daily basis and to work towards the business’s common goals.

Highly-engaged employees tend to be very clear on their role within the company and actively work to achieve the goals expected of them. They are directly linked to productivity. 

According to custominsight.com organizations with an engaged workforce outperform their competition. They have a higher earning per share (EPS) and recover more quickly after recessions and financial setbacks. Engagement is a key differentiator when it comes to growth and innovation. 

Attracting, finding, and hiring the right people is not easy. It’s time-consuming and expensive. But the process doesn’t end there. Once you hire the right people, you now have to find a way to retain them. Employee turnover is a financial burden on businesses and the best way to avoid that is to retain employees.

How do you retain employees?

By having a highly engaged workforce. The businesses most successful at retaining their talent are oftentimes businesses that have an employee-centric work culture.

So, how do you know if your workforce is an engaged one or not? You measure employee engagement. 

The global aggregate from Gallup data collected in 2014, 2015, and 2016 across 155 countries indicates that just 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their job. 

How to Measure Employee Engagement?

The best way to measure employee engagement is to conduct a survey. Go to the source: your employees. Conduct surveys frequently and efficiently. Don’t wait for the six-month mark to conduct a bi-annual appraisal. Do it more often than and make it easy for the employees to partake. 

Your surveys can be of two types. Short or long. 

Shorter surveys ask a few questions and can give you a general idea of the level of employee engagement in your company. These surveys, however, lack detail. Therefore, if your workforce has mostly disengaged employees, you won’t be able to determine the reasons for that using a short survey. 

Longer more detailed surveys can help you get to the root of the problem. These surveys have at least 50 or more questions designed to give you the complete picture. These surveys will assess your workforce and make it simpler to develop strategies to get your workforce to be more engaged.

There are a few other benefits of measuring employee engagement:

Once you have all the data collected. Use it to implement change. 

How to Maintain Employee Engagement?

So you’ve done the research, talked to your employees. What is the next step? The next thing you should do is use those results to improve employee retention within your company. Here are a few ways to do that:

Benefits of a Highly-Engaged Workforce

Time and again, research has shown a link between engaged employees and higher profitability, productivity, and customer engagement. There are more benefits of employee engagement:

Increased Productivity

Employees will be more productive since they are more engaged.

Higher Employee Retention Rate

Engaged employees don’t feel the need to look for work elsewhere thus bringing up your rates of employee retention.

Happier Customers

Research shows that engaged employees lead to happier, more engaged customers. 

Lower Rates of Absenteeism

When employees enjoy their job and are engaged in their work, they’re more likely to want to come to work as opposed to having to.

Engaged employees make it a point to show up to work and do more work — highly engaged business units realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity.

– source Gallup.

Things to Remember about Employee Engagement

While measuring and assessing your employee engagement is great for your business, there are some things to keep in mind.

Conclusion

Employee engagement can be an easy thing to implement if it’s prioritized. Once you get an accurate picture of how engaged your employees really are, use it to benefit you. Make relevant changes, make your employees feel heard. If you get this right you will easily surpass your competitors and also become a company that attracts top talent.