Improving the overall performance of your company is essential to success, which is why investing in employee engagement initiatives and outlining key objectives is so important.
Employee engagement has been proven time and time again to greatly improve company performance, and utilising objectives to track the success of your efforts is key. Without objectives, how would you identify the employee engagement ideas that would work for your company, or implement new infrastructure?
In this blog, we outline exactly what is employee engagement, and the three employee engagement objectives that should be at the top of your list.
Employee engagement is the act of creating and nurturing a working environment where employees feel best able to perform their jobs to a high standard. With research showing that investing in this type of environment results in a highly engaged workforce, improving business performance and profitability.
To achieve this positive working environment, employee engagement objectives must be identified, and infrastructure put in place to create a workforce that feels both physically and mentally supported.
The objectives of employee engagement activities, essentially, are to create a high-performing and engaged workforce by implementing infrastructure and employee engagement strategies that better support your team.
Realising this engaged workforce requires that you address key employee engagement areas, by implementing strategies to:
Each of these six key areas should be utilised to address and improve your three essential employee engagement objectives – business performance, employee experience and customer experience.
It can be easy to view employee engagement as simply a way to improve your employees’ work lives, without considering how this shift impacts on your company as a whole. An employee who feels fully engaged with their work and company is an invaluable asset, with employees who identify as being actively engaged being 4.6 times more likely to perform their best work. When you nurture this type of engagement across a whole team, you see 21% higher profitability, a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 10% increase in customer ratings.
To achieve these benefits, it is vital that you identify business performance, employee experience and customer satisfaction as your three key employee engagement objectives.
Implementing strategies to improve business performance is no new concept, but perhaps utilising employee engagement initiatives to realise this improvement is. Business performance should be viewed as one of your key employee engagement objectives, with your plans tailored to improve your team’s engagement with their work.
Utilising employee engagement strategies to increase productivity and motivate your employees will help you to attain the level of performance that you are hoping to achieve. Stay up to date with employee engagement trends to guide the initiatives that you put in place.
When your employees feel engaged with their work, performance increases, with studies showing a 17% increase in productivity and a 20% increase in sales in highly engaged teams. This level of improvement in performance cannot be ignored – when it comes to improving business performance, employee engagement should be at the top of your list.
Employees are the bedrock of your company - without them your business cannot succeed. This is why improving employee experience is an essential employee engagement objective.
The monotony of day-to-day life at work can negatively impact on your employee’s experience and job satisfaction. Nurturing an environment that benefits your employees’ work life and improves job satisfaction, is key to your team’s work experience and will help you to improve employee engagement and retention levels.
Consider how you can better understand the attitudes of your employees. Industry leading companies are increasingly implementing an employee engagement app to better understand their team. With this type of solution, you can encourage your team to give regular feedback through open communication channels and surveys. Communication is key to achieving your employee engagement objectives.
Identifying customer experience as an employee engagement objective is key to improving the profitability of your company. The way that your customers progress through the sales funnel and buyer journey, defines whether or not they complete their purchase or become a loyal customer.
The chances are that, during this process, they will come into contact with at least one of your employees. Recognising the role that your employees play in your customer experience is essential to your employee engagement strategy, with 79% of companies whose employees identify as being engaged reporting significantly better customer experience, often resulting in improved customer experience and retention.
Your customer experience cannot be improved without first addressing the engagement levels of your employees. Aligning employees with your company values and implementing an employee advocacy programme can help you to achieve the improvements that you are hoping to see.
The objectives of employee engagement are clear – invest in your team to improve business performance, employee experience and customer satisfaction. To realise these objectives, it’s essential that you begin now.
Create a plan and introduce employee engagement ideas to underpin the realisation of your objectives. Utilising software such as an employee engagement platform can help to guide and monitor the efforts of your strategy, enabling you to achieve better results and implement new strategies.