The Ultimate Guide to Employee Engagement
By: Hr Cloud
Tags: Employee Recognition, Employee Engagement, Employee Experience, Employeeonboardingprogram

Employee engagement is crucial for a business. It increases productivity, boosts innovation, increases retention, and brings a good name for your organization.

It is also said that employees who do not feel adequately recognized face a lower engagement. They are twice as likely to leave their job in the next year.

However, there are so many features to tracking employee engagement and strategies for improving employee engagement, especially for remote teams .

So if you are confused about where to start, here is the ultimate guide to employee engagement.

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Hire with employee engagement in mind

The decisions you make while hiring can lead to different results in the engagement of an individual employee as well as workforce engagement across the organization.

Every new hire you make has the possibility to impact how employees interact with each other, either strengthening the values of your organization or detracting from the work culture.

A successful hire occurs when a new employee aligns with the organization in many different aspects, including job details as well as the company’s overall culture .

Salary: Your new employee’s salary expectations should match what the company can unfailingly offer.

Your new employee’s salary expectations should match what the company can unfailingly offer. Values: Your new hire should respect how the organization operates to attain its goals.

Your new hire should respect how the organization operates to attain its goals. Competency: The new hire should have the skills to meet the responsibilities demanded by the position.

The new hire should have the skills to meet the responsibilities demanded by the position. Culture: The new hires should possess personal and emotional skills to be on the same page with their new colleagues and management.

Only when employees can align with all the aspects they will be ready to engage with your business.

Leverage onboarding tools and employee training

Your new hires are only learning to navigate the complexity and will need assistance in specific areas.

Thus, your first step should be to understand their viewpoint and work towards offering an onboarding experience that will keep them engaged.

According to a survey, 43% of new hires leave their jobs in the first 90 days as they felt that the role described during the process of hiring wasn’t what they experienced when they begin to work.

Another statistic suggests that organizations that offer inadequate onboarding programs have twice more chances of facing employee turnover.

This goes to show just how essential user onboarding can be!

The first impression is crucial and will have a significant impact on new employees’ expectations. However, first impressions don’t stop after new hires accept an offer.

Your newest employees will evaluate their experience more carefully during the initial few weeks with your business. If you are able to provide what you promised during the hiring process, it will deepen that initial good impression and make way for employee engagement.

So while onboarding requires several different tasks for compliance, you should not overlook the training and relationship building that will set a pattern of employee engagement from the start.

Consider using Whatfix’s on-demand employee training in-app to train your employees in real time. The interactive on-the-job eLearning solution enhances your training by aiding employees in their entire learning process while working.

Work on professionally developing your employees

If statistics are anything to go by, more than 70% of high-retention-risk employees will leave a company if they see no future progress in the present job.

If your employees feel that you don’t care about their professional development , they may see themselves as a denigrating asset.

Ask yourself why you value your employees. Is it for what they are offering right now, or you value them for what they can become while they work with you? If you are able to align your organization’s growth opportunities with the factors that motivate employees, it will increase employee engagement.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs elucidates different human motivation that starts with physical needs at the bottom that extend to self-actualization at the highest level.

Though the needs at the bottom take priority over the needs at the top, when you fulfill the needs at the top, it brings more satisfaction.

Improve retention with employee engagement

It has been seen time and again that regular communication between managers and employees have assisted in developing engaged employees. Another chance to help you continue this effective communication, allowing managers, employees, and leadership to offer authentic feedback and learn from each other is the exit interview process .

You should take action wherever necessary. Even when the economy is thriving, if there is an incompetent employee, you shouldn’t hesitate to replace him or her.

Employee engagement doesn’t blend with employee disengagement. If an employee is not showing any signs of improving their performance or making desirable changes, you can dismiss them while defending the other employees on that team.

To engage departing employees, you should offer appropriate transparency. Your employees will have their own reason why they depart. The appropriate details provided by the team members when they depart can aid the rest of the employees to process the change without making cynical guesswork.

Apart from that, recognize your employees’ reasons why they are leaving voluntarily. When you understand and categorize the reasons employees leave, it will help your organization to improve.

If any engaged employees are leaving voluntarily, stay connected with them. You can consider curating alumni networks to be in contact with past employees. It will give you access to expanded networking and employment opportunities.

Plus, it might make some employees come back to your organization with new skills and experiences in case a new position opens up.

Conduct best employee survey practices

As per 90% of workers, they are more likely to stay at an organization that takes and acts on feedback.

Learn what matters to employees most by conducting a survey of them. Your chief goal of surveying your employees should be to start a discussion and understand what will increase the level of personal investment at work.

Conduct the survey in such a way that it will yield the most thoughtful, timely responses. The catch here is to keep the surveys short and conduct frequent pulse surveys .

Conducting short but regular surveys work better rather than conducting long and irregular surveys for both employees and employers. It is because the fewer number of questions let employees think properly and reply at a higher rate.

Additionally, it’s a great idea to build a habit of transparency and share the results. Sharing all the data collected from surveys will demonstrate transparency and help you to engage employees.

Wrapping-Up

There you have it- the ultimate five tips to help you engage your employee . Following this guide will help you to engage your employee and retain them. Employee engagement will open doors for performance growth within organizations. It can increase productivity , boost innovation, increase employee retention, and boost the reputation of your organization.

You can’t build employee engagement in one day. But if you work on engaging your employees, you will find different benefits throughout the lifecycle of the employee, both for the employee and the organization.

If you’re looking for even more information, please download our complete eBook, “ How to Improve Employee Engagement “ today.

About the author: Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention . She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.