In a world with a significant labor shortage, businesses want to retain employees now more than ever. Employees play critical roles in your company; without them, your operation can’t function.
So, how can you keep employees on board? One way is to improve employee engagement. When employees are satisfied with their roles and responsibilities, it limits turnover and boosts the company’s brand and performance. Each of these things happens because employees want to be at their jobs. The question is, how do you improve employee engagement? We’ll get to that in a minute.
Live Out Your Company’s Mission and Values
What is your company’s purpose? What made you start or join this business? What do you value? It’s easy to lose track of ideals in the pursuit of earning revenue. But every business begins with a goal. Recovering that vision and actively communicating it can support employee buy-in, recruitment and engagement.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that nine out of ten Americans value meaningful work more than a high salary. If your company can incorporate its values into goals and tasks, employees might feel more committed.
Empower Employees with Growth Training and Resources
One of the primary reasons people leave their jobs is to explore career growth opportunities. It could be best for you and them if growth opportunities exist internally. Establishing training programs, upskilling and cross-training employees are key, but the concept of employee engagement is rooted deeper in culture. It all starts with building trust. How is that achieved?
HBR calls it compassionate leadership, a dynamic where employees are empowered to voice what they need to perform, be heard and be given opportunity to take initiative. The best strategy for leaders is to focus on communication and its ability to transform culture, company-wide.
“…they should focus on creating an environment that provides communication channels and encourages open discussion, proactively providing resources and tools to help employees understand their own needs, and being responsive to and supportive of employee requests.”
-The Harvard Business Review
In today’s hybrid workplace, communication platforms are critical to physically engaging and supporting employees. Microsoft Teams is one such resource that not only connects employees, it provides flexibility: employees can chat, conduct video meetings, organize and store resources in a fluid fashion. Teams feeds asynchronous collaboration, which enables employees to do their best work when and where they prefer.
Recognize and Reward Employees
If open communication is embraced across the organization, it should start to mitigate unreasonable expectations. Together, employees will ask, “How can we work together to accomplish this goal or task?” And when they do, recognition is in order.
Rewards give leaders a way to demonstrate how they value employees’ contribution and achievement, whether it be via completed projects, new ideas or significant milestones. What’s important is that credit be given to the specific individuals or team involved in the achievement.
Communicate Feedback
If trust is a focus for the organization, then open communication should be a definite goal, and it flows both ways. Employees may be used to receiving feedback from management in informal conversations and performance reviews, but how can you get honest feedback from employees?
Employee surveys, town halls or one-on-one meetings are a few options, but whether in-person or virtually, the trick is to ask specific, open-ended questions about struggles, opinions and ideas for improvement. The more information employees share, the more management can understand trends and true employee experience. Armed with data, they’re in a better position to make educated improvements and provide appropriate support.
Try Microsoft Teams to Engage Employees
Employee engagement involves communication, collaboration, culture, strong leadership and the right resources. Microsoft Teams is a cost-effective way to support all of the above, and if employees have a technical problem, they can ask for help using Tikit, a help-desk ticketing solution created specifically for Microsoft Teams. Asking for help (and resolving tickets) can all be accomplished in Teams, where your team is working.
See how the right ticket management system supports help desk analysts and provides a great user experience. Interested in giving it a try? Sign up for a free trial!
