Three years ago, we could never have imagined the seismic shifts we would experience in the workplace. The way we work and where we work has completely changed.
Since then, executives, business owners, and human resource leaders have been grappling with significant issues related to employee health and satisfaction while also keeping an eye on profitability, customer satisfaction, and a dynamic, competitive landscape.
No issues, however, have been more deserving of their attention than employee engagement. Especially during challenging times, when employees are engaged, they have an emotional commitment to their work, and they give it their all. Employee engagement impacts nearly every aspect of the business and can be measured in many ways.
Look at Your Level of Employee Engagement
How can you know whether your employees are engaged?
And how do you make improvements if they’re needed?
Let’s tackle these questions one at a time.
The best way to understand whether your employees are engaged is to ask them, and we recommend using a top-tier engagement survey to do this well.
The best surveys will allow you to slice and dice the data in a variety of different ways so you can understand how your employees are really feeling. You’ll want to learn about the specific levels of engagement in each of your departments, on each of your teams, and be able to sort the data by a variety of demographics like age, tenure, and gender.
Once you have a clear understanding of your employee’s engagement level, it’s time to figure out how to elevate it, and you do that by focusing on your company culture. The stronger your culture, the higher your employee engagement will be.
Since no two organizations are the same, no two cultures are either. What drives engagement at one company may not at another. Your survey will help you identify which cultural factors drive engagement in your organization so you can make a strategic improvement plan.
You can’t afford a weak company culture because it will drive engagement down. Check out this infographic which shines a bright light on the hard costs of a weak culture. Strong leaders know that if you take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers, and your business will thrive.
Excited to launch a survey now? Great!
But BEWARE!
First, you’ll want to build a simple plan to ensure success. One of the worst things you can do is survey in a vacuum. When an organization deploys an engagement survey and their employees spend time providing them with valuable feedback, they want to know that their voices were heard. They also want to understand the story the data tells. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen, and in some cases, they get nothing. Zero, nada, zilch. As you can imagine, handling a survey this way only further decreases engagement.
Before launching a measurement tool, prepare your pre-survey and post-survey communication. Plan to target one or two key areas that will have the most impact on your engagement and share your thinking with your employees. Then, put your plan into action!
How to Determine the ROI of Employee Engagement
So culture is important and engagement is key. Let’s talk about what you can expect when you do the work to elevate these.
Lift up the hood of your organization and consider:
- Do you have a high level of turnover in particular key, highly valuable employees?
- Are you seeing a persistent pattern of absenteeism?
- Are you seeing a decline in customer retention?
- Have company safety and processes and procedures become less stringent?
- Have you seen a decrease in productivity?
You can expect each one of these elements to improve with a focus on culture and engagement and all of these areas have a significant impact on organizational financial success.
Where to Start
For many of us, working from home has blurred lines between our “work-life” and our “home life.” More than ever, employees want to feel a strong sense of connection and belonging at work and they want the work they do to feel purposeful. When we help companies improve their culture and elevate engagement, we begin by helping them create a Shared Mission. We identify their core values and their reason for being help them to create a strong tether between each employee and the organization as a whole.
With that strong foundation in place, we are able to focus on each of the Four Engagement Elevators that will get us to the top.
This can’t be a one-time event, of course. Our company cultures are always changing. Each hire we make will either add to it or detract from it, and the changing business environment will be a consistent force pushing against it. Culture needs to be a consistent focus and we need to work to understand our people and their level of engagement all the time.
As leaders, we are only as strong as the weakest point. Engagement work transforms organizations, and there are turnkey solutions that drive impact.
This is a great time to start. Keep rising.
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