Employee Engagement Solutions: How to Help Talent Grow and Succeed

Employee engagement solutions can feel like a huge, insurmountable task. One that feels way too hard to tackle. I mean, where do you start? Right?

I get it. But hear me out. Employee engagement isn’t a massive task to achieve if you’ve got the right strategy, tools and mindset in place.

And the return on your investment of time, resources and strategy development, can be well worth the effort.

Today, I’ve provided the top five (5) employee engagement solutions. These strategies are not difficult to initiate, and they’ll get you started towards achieving a productive and happier team.

1 Employee Engagement Solutions: Goal Setting

Goal setting and tracking establishes the practice of aligning business goals, with employee goals. The ultimate aim here is to achieve common goals across the business. It’s the critical foundation for a successful employee engagement program.

There are a host of tools available today, to set, measure and track the progress of your employee engagement strategy. These goal tracking tools will enable you to meet the needs of the individual, whilst keeping them aligned to the goals of the business. This article provides insight into some of the best.

2 Employee Engagement Surveys

We discussed this one last week, and I can’t emphasise enough, the potential power of engagement surveys. They’re one of the easiest ways to boost worker engagement. And, one of the most effective.

In order to get the right surveys in place for your business, follow these simple steps:

1. Take a pulse on your current state. Ascertain where you currently stand with your workers, via quick pulse surveys that ask directly about levels of engagement, what they would change, and even flight risk.
2. Make sure business leadership is behind the engagement survey initiative.
3. Define the goal/s of your engagement survey. For example:
   1. Seeking new ways to engage employees
   2. Seeking to increase employee retention
   3. Improve communications between worker and manager
   4. Seeking to turn around a poor workplace culture
   5. Seeking to improve the employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
4. Create a list of the most pertinent questions, to be asked each time you run the survey. And do this with your goals in mind.
5. Deploy the survey via multiple channels: intranet, email, internal social media, Teams.
6. Share the results. Always.

3 Provide Feedback from Employee Engagement Initiatives

Sharing feedback on your employee engagement initiatives will offer a great roadmap for you and your workforce, to achieve business/employee alignment.

And, sharing feedback establishes transparency between management and workforce, and therefore instils trust.

Don’t overdo it though. Boring people to tears is a first-class ticket to disengagement. Instead, when communicating feedback use charts, graphs, vox pops, quotes and images to tell the workforce a story. That being the story of:

• the business goals
• where the business stands right now
• current state of workers mindset (survey feedback)
• the pathway to achieving set goals

Videos used in presentations are a great solution for communicating feedback (and can be easily delivered over Zoom). Employees can return to the videos time and again, especially if they’re fun, memorable and valuable.

Employee engagement has become a C-suite issue, with organisations waging an escalating war to design great workspaces, provide flexible benefits, and create compelling corporate cultures in an effort to drive higher engagement. It’s an aspect of workplace life that can—indeed, should—be continuously monitored in a proactive way.

Deloitte

4 Social Recognition: A Powerhouse Move for Business Culture

As you build your employee engagement solutions strategy, include the somewhat simple initiative of worker recognition.

Being acknowledged for performance, or upholding business values, holds great power in the talent engagement stakes.

Try not to be contrived in this initiative. And by that, I mean look beyond the business ‘squeaky doors’ (those workers you can’t ignore), to every level of worker and job family. Build a feedback loop with management, so they’re providing you with reporting on workers deserving of recognition. Think about sharing these accolades ‘spontaneously’ – that is, in a cycle of frequency that’s unexpected by the workforce.

And above all, be fair, egalitarian and consistent in your approach.

5 Personalise Employee Engagement

One-on-one meetings are becoming increasingly important in today’s workplace, given the rise of remote working on the back of the pandemic.

Aside from these current circumstances though, one-on-ones conducted with genuine interest and care, will help you to build a shared agenda. An agenda where business and career goals are aligned, and performance expectations are agreed upon.

And it almost goes without saying: one-on-one meetings have the power to create a bond between manager and worker. By displaying empathy, interest and understanding you’re able to boost engagement with your workers, thus helping them to grow and the business to succeed.

Employee engagement solutions don’t happen in a vacuum. All these initiatives are best executed and managed using technology. The technology that’s right for your business, will depend on many factors (including your existing tech stack). The clear power from your technology of choice, is the ability to use data to compare and analyse engagement over time, and the success (or otherwise) of your employee engagement initiatives.

If you’d like to discuss employee engagement in your business, you can reach me here. I look forward to hearing from you.