Vaughn Aust has perfectly quoted the secret to a successful business with this message: “happy employees lead to happy customers, which leads to more profits.”
So, if you’re looking for ways to keep your employees engaged, you’re in the right place.
According to a study, 51% of the team members are not engaged in the workplace environment. This high percentage of disengaged employees leads to revenue losses.
With changing workforce trends, it’s become necessary to communicate well with your employees, maintain transparency, and make them feel valued to increase the retention rate.
When you add some percentage to their paychecks, it will add a smile to their faces. However, it’s not always possible to give raises, and that’s not the only thing that keeps employees loyal.
Also, you can treat your employees as a strategic.
Sometimes, you need to think of creative ways to bring smiles to their faces and keep them happy.
On this page
How to Keep Employees Engaged?
Engaged employees can help you grow your business in the right direction. Here are a few ways to keep employees engaged.
1. Honesty and Transparency
It is essential to maintain transparency and honesty across verticals. It would help if you offered honest feedback to your employees.
At the same time, you need to listen to them and help them with their issues. Transparency is one of the best ways to keep employees engaged.
If you have an appraisal meeting, make sure you communicate the issues you are facing with them. At the same time, listen to their problems and feedback. Make sure you acknowledge these issues and try to rectify them.
You can use popular tools for feedback and surveys, which can help improve transparency in your organization. Glint is one of the many tools that employers use for surveys and feedback.
2. Implement Flexible Schedules
Let’s go back to when people were stuck in the offices for specific hours. Despite not being productive or having the ability to focus, they had to work in those schedules. The lack of flexibility and freedom impacted their productivity and led to disengagement.
Fast forward to today, where people are working in remote environments and choosing their working hours. With flexibility comes a lot of freedom. It reduces the stress and pressure that employees feel when they are supposed to work on fixed hours of the day.
Every person is productive at different hours, which is when they offer the best outcomes. Doing so can increase their happiness, too.
3. Provide Growth Opportunities
Mobility and opportunities in a career can motivate your employees to work harder and are one of the best ways to keep employees engaged. When they are stuck in a mundane routine, it often lowers their potential and makes them feel disengaged.
As a responsible employer, you should look for opportunities that best fit the employee. It’s essential to design various training and learning opportunities that help them take on new challenges and initiatives. The idea is to help them grow in their career.
A motivated employee with a laser focus on growth will add more value to your business. For instance, you can educate them by providing tools like DocuSign alternatives to enable them to learn to create contracts.
4. Appreciate Their Efforts
A simple “thank you” or “nice work” can go a long way in securing employee engagement. When you appreciate your people for the efforts they have put in, it’ll motivate them to work harder.
Rewarding them for their excellent work is one of the many ways to keep employees engaged. It encourages them to keep doing better. You can use tools like Kazoo and Nectar to bolster your reward strategies.
You can connect with your HR team and implement a reward system. Identify people who have added value or helped boost business profits and reward them through this system.
You can send out appreciation emails to your team for small wins using your email list management software so that everyone across the organization is aware of their efforts. This can go a long way in securing their engagement.
5. Encourage Unwinding Hours
Stress can impact your employees’ productivity. It can hamper the progress of a project or even burn them out.
As a manager or business owner, you should encourage your team members to step away from the desk and indulge in things that can break the stress.
For example, ask them to take lunch away from the work desk. Please encourage them to connect with teammates for a while or step out for a cup of coffee with others.
In case of remote working, ask them to take walks before coming back to the desk. You can write an email to encourse them to do physical activity during the breaks. These are but some of the productivity hacks you can leverage to keep them engaged throughout the day.
6. Create Space for Conversations
When employees meet and greet, they learn more, and it shows in their work. Additionally, it creates an environment where they feel at home. You will notice that brainstorming and collaboration can help create more ideas and help you innovate faster.
You can leverage various types of CRM tools to provide instant access support for data and information about your client so that employees can support you in effective ways.
It would help if you created spaces where people from different verticals can meet, connect, and discuss. It need not be work-related conversations too. This helps initiate collaborations and improves the overall workspace.
Coffee tables, small cafes, or even spots with bean bags are ways to keep employees engaged.
7. Build a Positive Environment
When you promote positivity in the workspaces, you are guaranteeing happy teams. You should encourage opportunities for growth and transition, allow your team members to take up new challenges, and offer complete support for the same.
You can acknowledge their achievements by taking the team out for lunch, offering them a new title, or even recognizing their efforts with unique benefits.
For example, a CMO consultant can get better results if he understands field hurdles and appreciates them for working with care and arrange monthly meetings out of the office to discuss and refresh his team for stress release.
Sponsoring their courses or providing them with an opportunity for a business trip are some other ways to keep employees engaged.
8. Help Manage Work-life Balance
One of the most critical aspects of employee engagement is the lack of work-life balance. In managing one aspect, the other suffers. Most often, it is life that suffers from the work pressures.
Eventually, you will notice burnout and a heavily stressed employee. Find out ways to keep employees engaged without burning them out.
Many companies opt for the four-day workweek or reduce the total work hours to keep employees engaged. The sprints are also planned, and the work is scheduled correctly. With these steps, the employees can work and manage their health too.
Apart from flexible working hours, managers should keep a check on the employees and identify ways to manage the workloads.
We earn a commission when you buy through the links on this page. Affiliate disclosure.
We recommend the following books to increase employee engagement:
- 1001 ways to engage employees
- The Truth about employee engagement
- Build it: the rebel playbook for World-class Employee Engagement
- Employee engagement for dummies
- Carrots and sticks don’t work
Conclusion
Employee engagement is not only crucial for business growth but also for increased retention. When your team is happy, they become your biggest advocates, resulting in satisfied customers and a reputed brand.
It is essential to find ways to keep employees engaged to ensure that you’ve got the best employees on board.
As an employer, you should work on identifying ways to keep the employees happy within offices and outside. Motivate them to connect with teammates, recognize their work, and help them grow for the better.
Have any questions about these employee engagement tactics? Ask them in the comments.
Featured image source: Freepik Premium