Employee engagement – what’s it about?

Employee engagement is about creating a work culture that makes it easy for people to thrive, do their best and drive your company forward. It’s about caring for your people; who they are and what they want out of work, and providing support and encouragement along the way.

It is well known that the biggest and best companies put their people first. They reap the rewards of doing so with increased productivity, motivation and wholehearted endorsement from their employees. These are the companies that have discovered that high levels of employee engagement lead to better outcomes all round – improving the quality of the products or services being offered, the happiness and general wellbeing of the staff who work there and, of course, the bottom line.

But how do they get there? And how can you do the same?

The first step is something of a stock-taking operation. You want to find out just how your people feel about working for you. What do they think of their working environment, for example? How do they feel about the company culture? You may already have an idea of general feelings, but you will find out a lot more and get a far more accurate picture if you do a little formal investigation.

The easiest way to do this is by carrying out a survey and holding some discussion groups. You will want to cover topics like job satisfaction, what makes people feel valued, opportunities for personal development, and so on. And you want to find out what your employees love about working for you as well as about what they think you could do better. We can help you with this.

Once you have a really good idea of the main drivers and barriers to engagement, you can put together a plan to address what you need to do to break down any barriers, and promote what your investigations highlighted as working well. There are many different ways to address barriers to employee engagement, and what you choose to do depends on what you discovered in the first step. It could be that some training for supervisors would help establish a better approach to appraisals, or that flexible working arrangements would benefit any of your people wanting to improve the balance between work and home life.

Whatever approach you choose, don’t forget to follow up to find out if your improvements are working as you intended and make your surveys and discussion groups a regular part of business, to get a consistent picture of how your people feel about working for you and to gather ideas.