Employee engagement has become increasingly important over the year driven by the pandemic. Due to the hard lockdown measures at the start of 2020, lots of people are still working from home. This makes it harder for employers to understand how their employees feel. There are multiple ways to approach this from a managerial perspective. For example, one-on-one conversations can help to get insights into how people feel. What are their current pain points? What is going well? What do they like to see improved? Although this provides insights into the individual needs, it also helps to understand what is employee engagement?
Employee engagement in a nutshell
In short: employee engagement indicates how engaged your employees are with the company. This is not only limited to the individual aspects, but also the alignment with the company in general. For example, do employees feel aligned with the mission of the organization? This can be a good indicator of their engagement, according to research. People who feel aligned with the organization’s mission and vision are more likely to feel happy at work. They feel that their work adds to the purpose and in turn, has a positive effect on what they find important.
Personal employee elements are included as well
Alignment with the company values is just the start. Individual employee elements are included as well. How do you currently feel? What can improve, both personally and professionally? This can be retrieved through conversations and surveys, depending on the depth and sensitivity of the questions.
Analyzing the insights
Analytics is harder when it comes to individual conversations. However, there are also surveys available from third parties that can be leveraged. If you decide to work together with a third party, you will be able to leverage their templates as well as dashboards and other analytical tools. This helps you to understand what the data is telling you. As these dedicated companies have helped lots of companies, they can automatically provide you with lessons learned on the data. More importantly, they can help you to decide on the next steps to move forward.
Improving the engagement of your employees
Once you have these insights at your disposal, you can start the improvement of employee engagement. For example, the next steps can add up to a program that you can execute based on survey outcomes. These next steps need to be measurable, as this helps you to track the progress of the program. Having these tangible insights can help you to create a more engaged workforce resulting in increased productivity.
Interested to learn more about this topic? Effectory.com is a leading player in the field and offers a wide variety of services and solutions. Besides that, their website includes lots of tips and tricks that can help you get more engaged employees.