When it comes to running a successful business or brand, many factors come into play. The most important ones are usually part of the company’s financials: the sales, revenues, and profit margins. However, if you focus only on those areas and fail to look at the underlying processes of your business and those who make it up, you could be missing out big-time.
A perfect example of this is employee engagement. With productivity and growth on the minds of all business owners, it’s not just a matter of scaling in size and hiring—it’s also a matter of making sure that you get the most out of each hire. This is exactly what we will be looking at in this article, while also providing you with some resources and quotes to help inspire improved engagement within your own company.
Measuring employee engagement
It’s easy to say that employee engagement is important, but until you’ve actually seen its successful implementation within a company or talked to someone who has experienced it firsthand, it can be hard to understand how engagement could improve the success of your own organization.
According to recent Gallup poll, there are two main reasons why employee engagement implementation fails for most companies:
- An employee engagement program needs to be a manager education and development initiative, not a measurement initiative—but many are really just the latter.
- Companies are not nearly selective enough about whom they name as their managers, at every level.
This same survey also reports that the percentage of engaged employees worldwide is currently at 15%, while the U.S. is seeing rates of 33%. Even though the U.S. number is slightly more than double than the rest of the world, it’s still only one-third of engagement across a whole team. However, as mentioned, other businesses and brands have been able to find success in this area.
Provide knowledge sharing and open communication
“Employee engagement is quickly growing to be one of the biggest problems in the global workforce,” says Roope Heinilä, the CEO of Smarp, an employee advocacy platform that encourages cross-team discussions. “As we move to an ever more knowledge-based economy, the ability and willingness of employees to apply their skills often makes or breaks the entire company.”
Heinilä believes that knowledge sharing and open communication inside organizations is key to engaging employees, as it helps to give team members a sense of investment in their company’s vision, mission, and impact. “This will give employees a purpose that goes beyond their job description and allow them to take more pride and initiative in their work,” he says.
Do better hiring and screening
As one can imagine, it’s not simply a matter of talking to each of your employees—it’s also about the hiring and screening process. And unfortunately, some recruits will simply never get to that level of engagement or productivity that companies are looking for.
RELATED: 5 Strategies for Hiring Superstar Employees in Your Small Business
“From my experience, the best way to get high employee engagement is to screen candidates better in the hiring process,” says Jason Quey, VP of Marketing at Codeless and founder of TheStorytellerMarketer.com. “One of the most effective ways I do this is by testing the potential employee with skills tests, where I can grade their performance and see if they meet deadlines. I run them through a series of tests to see how they think and respond to each problem. Naturally, less skilled and lazy candidates drop off, but the cream of the crop slowly rises to the top. Not only does this help hire better workers, it makes workers feel accomplished to even get the job they are working at.”
There is more than one solution
Of course, there are other ways that a company can improve the engagement of its workforce. Steven Green, the CEO of employee recognition and idea collaboration platform TemboSocial, champions the role that corporate leadership plays in forging an engaged culture. “Instead of ruling by guidelines and restrictions, executive leaders should be focused on empowering their employees and bringing out the best talent they have to offer,” he wrote in a recent blog post.
“Having motivated, passionate workers who are focused on the success of their projects and the way they can contribute to their teams can kindle an organization’s success, fueling creative thinking that revolutionizes processes or leads to innovative new projects,” Green asserts.
Smarp’s Heinilä sees this perspective as a reversal of many executives’ paternalistic instincts. “To succeed in today’s environment, companies need to take an ‘employees first’ approach where customer satisfaction, sales, and the bottom line result from engaged employees acting for the company,” he says. “Employers need to remember that their company is a product of their employees, not vice versa.”
As you can see, when it comes to the overall engagement and productivity from employees within a company, there definitely is no quick-fix solution. Just like all businesses and organizations have their own business model, work ethic, and employees, they will also have their own methods for improving productivity and engagement in the workplace.
RELATED: 7 Great Performance and Productivity Boosters to Try Out on Your Employees
The post Employee Engagement Secrets: Real Business Owners Share How They Get the Most Out of Their Staff appeared first on AllBusiness.com
The post Employee Engagement Secrets: Real Business Owners Share How They Get the Most Out of Their Staff appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Zac Johnson.
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