Improve employee engagement

Employee engagement is the emotional connection an employee has with their employer. An engaged employee believes in the mission and values of their organisation and contributes positively to those. They are highly motivated and often go above and beyond what is expected of them.

Highly engaged teams bring significant benefits to an organisation. These benefits include:

1) Increased productivity – an engaged employee wants to do their best for their employer. They will go above and beyond what is expected of them, working more efficiently and paying closer attention to what they do.

2) Improved customer service – engaged employees believe wholeheartedly in their organisation’s mission and values. As such, they deliver a more passionate service to customers. When they take pride in what they do, your customers will notice a difference and they themselves are more likely to be loyal.

3) Reduced staff turnover – engaged employees are typically very loyal employees. With less employees looking for work elsewhere organisations can maintain momentum without the distraction, or cost, of recruiting and training up new employees.

4) Less absenteeism – contented and engaged employees are less likely to take time off. They believe in what they do and thus have more motivation.

5) Positive influence – when you have a group of employees who are advocates of the company their positivity is likely to spread to others. These advocates are also likely to take the time to support their colleagues and share the company values they believe in.

6) Improved health and safety – engaged employees not only take time to absorb safety information, they will also be more mindful of their surroundings and how their actions will impact others.

7) Better business performance – highly engaged employees directly impact organisational performance. Each of the six points above will lead to higher efficiencies and profitability.

Measuring employee engagement is vital. Without it you cannot benchmark where you are, or measure the effectiveness of improvements. There are various ways you can measure your employee engagement:

1) Employee surveys – regular employee surveys will help you understand what your employees are thinking and gather their opinion on how you can improve engagement.

2) Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) – one question that gives you an overarching view of how your employees feel about working at your organisation.

3) Staff turnover – by measuring staff turnover and absenteeism rates you can get a feel as to whether engagement levels are improving or decreasing.

4) Interaction with internal communications – the depth and regularity of engagement with internal communications can give a good indication as to how invested your employees are.

We recommend you use all of the above methods of measurement for a well-rounded, thorough understanding of employee engagement.

Employee engagement software provides tools to internal communicators and HR professionals to help them engage with employees and measure and monitor engagement levels. A good employee engagement platform will enable you to send internal communications and monitor their performance. They will also enable the distribution of employee surveys and collation of responses and establish overall employee engagement statistics.