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Building A Blueprint For Effective Employee Engagement

Building A Blueprint For Effective Employee Engagement
by Bernard Coleman III

How can an organization increase engagement at the workplace? Well, it’s really simple: Know your audience. But before organizations can learn their audience, they need to find, hire and equip managers to effectively engage staff to add to organizational success.

Organizations can gauge their employee’s level of engagement using a variety of tools and metrics, such as surveys, scorecards, listening tours, suggestion boxes and other methods that are directed at helping to understand employees. This ultimately accomplishes three main objectives:

1. Motivation: Employees are the heartbeat of an organization, and properly assessing what motivates them can build an environment that emphasizes an employee-centric ethos.

2. Direct engagement: Employees are provided a voice in the shaping of their work environment. It is critically important to acknowledge the suggestions, thoughts and feelings of your staff so that they know that their input matters.

3. Measurement: Define the values that your organization is seeking to measure as it relates to effective engagement. Once the values are defined, evaluate changes and chart any positive developments made to determine an engagement effort's success or failure on an ongoing basis.

It’s important to note that when crafting engagement surveys and soliciting suggestions, organizations should take care to be deliberate so that outcomes are actionable to viably improving the workplace and understanding what motivates employees. There’s nothing worse than setting expectations that can’t truly be met.

There are many strategies that can be employed that may be used to achieve greater levels of engagement, employee satisfaction and increased productivity.

Let’s start with a few cultural norms that can be easily put in place:

1. Training and professional development: Employees naturally want to grow. It's not healthy or productive to expect staff to remain in stasis. If you want to see greater levels of happiness, start by investing in your people. I am a firm believer that people want to do well and add value. If an employee feels that their career is stagnating, they are more apt to seek out opportunities that will help fulfill their personal and professional growth.

2. A culture of inclusion and belonging: Many times, I have seen organizations espouse certain beliefs in the interview process and in their mission and values, but when you look behind the proverbial curtain, you find that the values and the expressed culture are incongruent. Organizations that seek greater productivity need to focus on making the values more than just a talking point but a reality. If not, employees will notice the inconsistency and won’t remain engaged for long, particularly if they feel they were misled.

Read full article on Forbes.