Employee Engagement has been an ongoing challenge for Human Resources professionals and Company Leaders. But it’s a new year, so the time is right to make employee engagement a priority for your organization. Before you announce your annual initiatives consider employee engagement as not just a program you run as part of a larger initiative, think of it AS the larger initiative.
So how can you make employee engagement part of your company identity? Bring employees of all levels in to solve your biggest problems and share in your biggest successes. Here are the two biggest pillars of driving employee engagement:
Share the responsibility of driving profits and growth.
Bring your employees in to help brainstorm and problem-solve around your company’s biggest challenges. Don’t silo your executives to create a plan around the difficulties, open it up to your whole organization. It brings all employees in to your inner-circle and invokes company-wide transparency and group problem-solving. Making employee trusted partners in your business will not only drive their careers forward, but it will also build loyalty.
Share the fruits of successful labor.
The outcome of hard work and solving large-scale problems, is to enjoy and share in the success. This is the more traditional way employee engagement has been positioned previously. Once employees have worked with your leadership to solve big challenges, they deserve big rewards. Whether this comes in the form of a bonus, an experience or a non-cash gift, like a gift card, make sure that the rewards circulated match the scale of the work employees put in.
Employee engagement is as much about the work as the reward, in order to build long term relationships, but it is imperative that employers don’t skimp on giving back to employees.
Building a culture of employee engagement is a key component of building trust, loyalty and long-term relationships with your employees. Ensure that the employee engagement isn’t just a program that exists in a silo, but something that weaves in and out of the fiber of your company and your employees ever-day responsibilities.
