Improve employee engagement in 7 simple steps
Many organisations struggle to see tangible success from their employee engagement activities. Discover how you can boost staff involvement and reap the benefits of a happier, more productive workforce.
Employee engagement is proven to reduce staff turnover, improve productivity, help retain customers, and increase profits.
How? Because engaged employees are happier, both at work and in their lives. When you’re engaged, it infuses everything you do with purpose, energy, and enthusiasm.
And this is more important today than ever. The next-generation workforce expects more from their jobs. They don’t just want a place to graft between 9 and 5, they want to have a say in the direction of your business and a stake in the success of your organisation.
When you have an environment where employees are engaged by their work, you’ll notice:
With the right knowledge, the right tools, and – most importantly – an employee-focused mindset, it can be a powerful way to transform your organisation.
Employee engagement is important because it can affect your bottom line. Disengaged employees cost the economy over £50 billion a year in lost productivity.
Personnel who lack engagement make 100 times more errors than their engaged colleagues and spend less time working; they chat, take more breaks, procrastinate, surf the internet etc.
What’s worse, the negativity of disengaged staff rubs off on the people around them, turning potentially engaged employees into non-engaged workers.
Source: Queens University - Communicating in the workplace
But, keeping everyone informed and involved is easier said than done. Common barriers include the fact that not every business has…
Furthermore, newer barriers are appearing. 43% of all employees now work remotely at least some of the time. Flexible working, changing employee expectations, and new technology are presenting new challenges to internal communications.
Maintaining control of your vision and message is another major challenge for businesses. The “always-on” technology landscape means that information about your business is now available for all your employees to see – before the monthly newsletter is a twinkle in its creator’s eye.
But, it’s not all bad news, because these challenges also present opportunities. New ways of working and new technology help alleviate traditional problems such as incomplete cascades and the reliance on Line Managers to correctly interpret information.
In order to engage employees, you need to create an internal communications plan to share the strategic direction and company vision. This will help connect Directors with those working at the coalface of your operation.
Directors make decisions on how to run a company daily and employees are the ones who live and breathe the impact of these decisions. Without understanding the what and the why, employees lose their enthusiasm and become disengaged.
Forums and platforms that enable collaboration give management more opportunity to interact with communications and information. This makes the whole process of sharing information more efficient and a two-way experience.
Corporate structure aside, the most effective internal communicators have strong relationships with functions throughout the organisation. So often, an “information is power” attitude manifests itself as a reluctance to share and interact. Suddenly silos are popping up all over the place. According to a Queens University study, 39% of employees are feeling the impact of a lack of collaboration.
This becomes more prevalent the larger your organisation becomes. If you open a new office or start franchising out your brand, it becomes harder to maintain business alignment.
The key to effective business alignment is to ensure that everyone knows what the right direction is (the goal) and what their part is in getting there (their role).
Only when your staff see the bigger picture can they align themselves with the goals of your company, and work towards them. When employees feel aligned, it leads to a sense of engagement.
It may sound simple but breaking down barriers can be hard work and needs continual attention. Luckily there are tools and platforms, which can help to facilitate collaboration, and implementing the right ones for your organisation can be a catalyst for cultural change.
To give employee engagement the credibility it deserves, it must be championed at the very top level. Unfortunately, the function rarely has a seat at the high table. However, this doesn’t mean the director responsible can’t champion the cause and make sure the topic is constantly on the agenda.
An organisation that keeps employee engagement at its heart will create a recipe for success. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and it starts, as all good culture does, at the top of the business.
Source: Queens University - Communicating in the workplace
Engagement starts with a feeling of inclusion, which is why letting your employees voice opinions is part of internal communications best practice. It’s a great way to check the pulse of what matters at the coal face of your business.
With the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, people expect to be able to engage in a two-way conversation. This presents an interesting challenge for internal communicators, especially given that many organisations haven’t adopted this type of channel internally.
The voice of our employees is amplified by our digital society. But only 30% of staff feel like their voices are heard. By becoming a conduit for discourse – in the right forum and on the right topics – you can go a long way towards improving engagement and creating a truly collaborative workplace.
Source: Gallup 2017 - How to Create a Culture of Psychological Safety
Best practice is to create a safe, inclusive environment for people to be heard. The strong personalities will always speak up when asked, but the quieter types also need to be encouraged to participate and contribute.
The Internal Communications team need to operate from a position of trust to create an environment of effective engagement. To achieve trust from everyone, this department needs to be carefully aligned within your organisation.
Being too closely aligned with one directorate might earn an internal communicator the dubious label of Spin Doctor. On the other hand, being out of touch with the business strategy risks them being considered out of the loop and unreliable.
Achieving trusted advisor status requires more than just communicating effectively. For an Internal Communications team to become trusted, they need to demonstrate experience, a wider business understanding, and the ability to see something from all angles.
They sometimes need to disengage themselves as an employee and try to see things simply as a communicator.
Creating a mechanism that is effective and trustworthy takes maturity and self-respect. Both of which come from being exposed to business decisions, reasoning, and strategy.
Additionally, consider providing stakeholder management training. More so than in other roles, the internal communications team may have to discuss or offer a counter opinion to senior leaders. They need to understand how to do this tactfully and respectfully.
That way, internal communications teams can create effective forums for engagement, based on truth and business strategy.
Source: Gatehouse - State of the Sector 2018
Demonstrating a return on investment, an impact on the bottom line, is a major challenge for something as conceptual as employee engagement. A lack of clear objectives within the organisation creates a grey area that is at risk of being filled with well-intentioned, but ineffective, activity.
Achieving a clear set of actions, tied to results and outcomes, takes discipline. It’s critical that these actions revolve around the strategy of the business and contribute, ultimately to the growth of that business.
Traditionally, it’s been hard to convince leaders of the value of employee engagement, with the concept seen as a ‘nice-to-have’. The fact that 60% of communicators don’t measure the effectiveness of their activity demonstrates the low priority internal communications and employee engagement is.
Source: Veronika Mazour - How to measure your internal communications’ effectiveness?
Determining deliverables is the first step to building a strategic mindset. When it comes to employee engagement deliverables include:
A clear, measurable business strategy should be easy to interpret at all levels of the organisation. Departmental and personal objectives can be derived from it and critical projects or deliverables planned.
Surveying and measuring employee engagement should never be a one-time event. Once you’ve launched a new tool or initiative it’s essential to get feedback to see if it worked.
You may find that it does, or you may find that it didn’t go far enough. Your plan may improve engagement in one department or section but uncover issues in another.
Whether your deliverables are briefings, channel management, or surveys, you should automate processes where possible to help streamline the department.
Source: Gatehouse - The definitive survey of the Employee Engagement and Internal Communication landscape 2018
So, in addition to regularly surveying employees, set up a dashboard to track vital success metrics. Compare this data against your survey responses to determine if your changes are contributing to your business goals.
Social media blurs the lines between internal and external communication. And brands are increasingly turning to their employees as advocates of their products and services.
Nurturing brand advocates internally gives your messaging an engaging, peer-to-peer channel. So, as well as being a measurement of employee engagement, advocacy can become the catalyst for greater engagement throughout your organisation.
It’s been well documented that storytelling is a powerful way of communicating. It affects the human brain differently, making it more memorable. The continual search for content that entertains, engages, and adds value to the buyer journey is a great reason to use storytelling to bring the human touch to a brand.
Source: Weber Shandwick - Employee Activism: The next frontier of employee engagement
The Internal Communications team is ideally placed to uncover some of the human angles behind a brand and, in doing so, improve employee engagement by celebrating some of the unsung heroes within your organisation.
Getting involved in advocacy and brand building creates another angle to the internal narrative of a business and creates content that resonates with staff. Those stories are then available to the wider external audience and provides share-worthy material.
This approach creates a rich tapestry of communication with the organisation. This helps build strong internal relationships, breaks down silos, and encourages more meaningful interaction.