1. Ensure a Great Onboarding Experience: Create a positive first impression for new employees to foster a sense of belonging and loyalty from day one.
2. Provide Career Development Opportunities: To enhance employees’ engagement and motivation and offer growth paths and professional development aligned with their skills and goals.
3. Empower Employees: Encourage employees to discover their potential by assigning challenging tasks, supporting them in decision-making, and avoiding micromanagement.
4. Promote Open Communication: Foster a culture of honest, transparent communication, allowing employees to share their views and opinions, which builds trust and strengthens engagement.
5. Reward and Recognize: Appreciate employees’ efforts, achievements, and contributions.
Today, employee engagement has emerged as one of the critical strategies for organizations to gain an edge over the competition. Hence, organizations need to look at how to improve employee engagement effectively.
Employee engagement goes beyond organizing occasional get-togethers for the workforce or rewarding them for their excellent work.
Employee Engagement is more about implementing strategies that enhance an employee’s sense of belonging to the organization.
It is also about making the employees believe in the organization’s future and contributing to it with their full potential.
Having the right engagement strategies in place is essential for organizations looking to develop a highly productive and efficient workforce.
While the engagement needs of every workforce may vary, some common strategies prove equally effective in all work environments.
A few practical strategies that can go a long way in improving employee motivation levels are discussed here:
1. Ensure a great onboarding experience
2. Provide relevant career development opportunities
3. Empower employees to discover their potential
4. Appreciate their individual and combined achievements
5. Promote open, honest, and transparent communication
Making a good first impression is the key to ensuring high employee engagement levels from day one.
A great onboarding experience assures the employees that the organization truly cares about the members of its workforce.
It also helps establish the right mindset and makes them feel involved with the organization.
Such employees are more likely to develop a deep sense of belonging and loyalty and stay with them for a long time.
Organizations need to understand that the individual members of the workforce have specific professional skills and career development objectives.
Offering appropriate career development opportunities to employees can boost their sense of engagement.
Employees feel truly valued when provided with career paths for professional growth that match their skill sets and experience.
This significantly motivates them to improve their contribution to the growth of the business.
Discovering their true potential is the key to providing employees with the right career growth opportunities.
For this, organizations need to empower employees and enable them to discover what they are capable of.
A good example would be assigning projects and tasks slightly beyond the employees’ usual capabilities and comfort level. This helps build the employees’ confidence and improve their self-worth and trust.
Empowering employees also requires managers and supervisors to step back, stop micromanaging, and let them make decisions while supporting them as needed.
It might also mean tolerating small failures sometimes and preparing them for more significant challenges.
Recognizing the efforts and achievements of the employees is an essential aspect of boosting engagement.
In addition to appreciating individual employees, organizations also need to have policies for recognizing team efforts and achievements.
However, recognition and appreciation prove effective only when it is offered on time and in a regular manner.
Organizations must remember that the most expensive rewards and cash incentives cannot always guarantee results.
Instead, the intent behind employee recognition and how it is delivered matters the most.
Honest and transparent communication at the workplace is another effective strategy that can help improve employee engagement.
It is not only about sharing important information with employees but also listening to their views and opinions.
Implementing this strategy helps strengthen the mutual trust between employees and the management.
This two-way communication is one of the most critical aspects of building strong employee engagement in the organization.
Creating a workplace where the employees are highly engaged and motivated can ensure greater benefits for both the business and the individual members of the workforce.
The strategies above can go a long way in creating a significant competitive advantage for the business.
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of corporate and entrepreneurship experience. In the past, Sagar has worked in leadership roles with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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