Ensuring employees are focused and committed to their work will ensure a valuable and profitable contribution to your business. Learn how to improve employee engagement with these tips or contact our small business advisors for help.
While daily tasks vary based on the type of industry and business, there are universal strategies that employers and managers can implement to ensure staff and employees are optimally engaged in their work.
Consider the following:
Collaborative projects
A great way to engage employees is to promote a team culture by introducing collaborative projects. Working together is effective when brainstorming and problem-solving, to ensure the best strategies are being implemented. With individuals working on a project, questions related to practicality and how to improve the project are much more likely to arise, thus strengthening the overall outcome of the project.
Many people dislike collaborative projects as it requires them to communicate with others and forces an element of accountability over the work they produce. When hiring employees, make it clear that the workplace encourages a team-based atmosphere to weed out the applicants that may not be prepared to work with others.
Encourage and support positive well-being
Employees that work hard and prioritise the business goals are amazing assets to have, but if they don’t live a balanced lifestyle and only focus on their job performance, they are more likely to burn out.
Creating a work environment where employees feel lucky to work with the business rather than resent their job will create a sense of commitment and loyalty between employees and the business and is definitely one of the answers to the question “How to improve employee engagement?”.
Effective ways to create this sense of commitment include:
- Allowing employees time to catch up on work they have missed through being sick or having other extenuating circumstances.
- Encouraging a focus on health, by promoting different physical activity pursuits (eg. office fun runs or lunch time fitness).
- Making it easy & encouraging employees to participate in commitments outside of their work like special milestones their children participate in.
- Making facilities available for employees to store and prepare healthy meals.
- Allowing employees time to attend appointments during work hours.
Flexibility
A flexible employer is one that treats their employees as people with lives outside of work, not just as cogs in the wheel that only function to serve business objectives. By providing flexibility to your employees and staff members, you are going to have individuals that want to work for you and will retain them longer because of the benefits that come from being a part of the team.
Ways to provide flexibility include:
- Having flexible working hours, such as starting and finishing late, starting and finishing early, or splitting a shift due to an appointment in the middle of the day.
- Allowing a 9 day fortnight, enabling staff to take care of any other commitments on their fortnightly RDO (rostered day off).
- Allowing staff and employees to work weekends.
- Offering the option to working remotely.
*** This publication is for guidance only, and professional advice should be obtained before acting on any information contained herein. Neither the publishers nor the distributors can accept any responsibility for loss occasioned to any person as a result of action taken or refrained from in consequence of the contents of this publication. Publication date January 2018
