How Can You Engage Your Employees?

As we have mentioned in a previous blog, customer service is often a driving force for setting your organization apart from competitors. The main way to accomplish respectable customer service is by engaging your employees. Additionally, in such a competitive market, you need worker engagement to ensure that your talented staff stays with you for the long run. Obviously, staff engagement is crucial to business.

Talent is quickly turning into a competitive advantage – so it’s imperative for every manager to put practices into place that help retain staff while keeping them happy. But with the pressure to succeed, managers often lose sight of how best to engage team members in a way that increases employee satisfaction. Remember, extremely involved people outperform companies with the most disengaged people across a wide spectrum of metrics.

The following are five ways to encourage great performance and engage employees:

• Listen to your Employees: Hearing your employees’ voices is the first step toward engaging them. One of the greatest ways to accomplish this is through annual engagement surveys. By gaining a deeper look into each department and understanding what your staff is trying to tell the organization, you are able to analyze what your company is doing as a whole. Remember, engagement begins when your staff understands the “why” behind their jobs, what they’re expected to achieve, and why it’s essential to the greater good.
• Guide Employee Goals Based on Results: Collecting data and communicating is only part of the story. It’s important to be able to take useful information regarding employee satisfaction to improve goal development and alignment. Managers must be able to analyze satisfaction results and connect them to changes adopted as a result. Every staff member must know how important their work is and how other employees and managers depend on it.
• Develop Goals Specifically with Engagement in Mind: It’s crucial that your goals are specific, especially those that apply to engagement. To see improvement in staff engagement, employees must have specific, measurable goals and must be held accountable for ensuring these goals stay measurable and specific.
• Communicate Clearly and Consistently with Employees: If you want to engage your employees, you need to keep them in the loop about what is going on. There is nothing more disengaging for employees than finding out they’re the last to know about significant information. By utilizing things like regular feedback meetings, you can keep your employees informed about what they are doing well and what areas need improvement.
• Connect Goals to Development: Understanding the “how” behind employees’ jobs is just as important as understanding the “why”. The “how” is more than just measurement and goals – employees who want to know how to be better at their jobs and build careers. Development helps employees gain the necessary knowledge and skills.

Contact Third Wave today to learn more about analyzing business data and utilizing CRM systems!