5 Steps Towards Better Employee Engagement

Your favorite employee comes in every morning at 9 a.m. sharp, always smiling. He wishes you a good morning and gets right to work. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, right? But what if deep down, he’s been harboring resentment and unhappiness for months or even years, and right inside his backpack is a resignation letter?

Yikes.

What went wrong? And when? Stay one step ahead and avoid these situations by implementing the following ideas.

Employee Satisfaction Begins with Great Employee Engagement

You’ve set up a team bonding activity next week, perhaps ceramic painting or an escape room — who’s going? Not going? Coworkers are going out for lunch — who stayed? Chances are, the same people who keep avoiding activities and hanging out with their coworkers, are not very satisfied.

Employee participation is an important part of any work culture. The more tight-knit the work community or department is, the happier employees tend to be. They seek out fun events for their coworkers to go to and have built genuine friendships that make work a more enjoyable place to be. Studies have shown that the more friends an employee has at work, the more likely they are to refuse another job offer.

While some individuals may shy away from team activities, they will still join for a bit if they are happy and loyal to the company. If someone is always backing out, avoiding team events, and staying reclusive, it may be a good idea to have a conversation with them and see if there’s anything they would like to change.

While checking in with someone is a start, here are some other ideas for reducing employee turnover.

Suggestion Box

Yes, it’s old fashioned. But ideas like this stand the test of time for a reason.

If you’re a smaller company and have a limited budget, this is the easiest way to get started. Measuring employee satisfaction and loyalty starts with simply asking for feedback. For a small team, it’s easier to gauge how employees feel. Typically, responses about the workplace in general will be similar. The anonymity aspect to it should also encourage more honesty.

HR can go through the box once a week and let employees know if any changes will be made given certain feedback. Make sure to emphasize that the suggestion box is for complaints, compliments, and any ideas for a change to the workplace or group activities.

You may even set out a question in front of the box for employees to answer that week. Some can be as simple as, “How long do you envision yourself staying here?” or more in depth, “Are you happy here?”

Voice of Employee (VoE) Survey

The Voice of Employee (VoE) survey is an anonymous, in-depth survey used to measure employee engagement. Answers to these questions provide actionable insights for managers.

A VoE Survey may be sent via a free survey creation tool to get an idea of an employees’ level of motivation and loyalty. It is also commonly used to find out how employees feel about the company’s leadership team, their own team and how it is managed, as well as the company as a whole.

Most VoE Surveys require a minimum amount to be written in an open-ended comment box to fully capture employees’ thoughts beyond the multiple choice answers. If anything surprising or extremely negative comes up, you can ask employees how much they agree or disagree with the sentiment and why to figure out if this is single opinion or something that requires immediate and drastic change.

Encourage a 100% response rate by offering incentives to those who complete the survey on the first date, and to the entire company if everyone finishes the survey by a certain deadline.

Performance reviews

Let’s be honest: almost no one enjoys performance reviews. They can be tedious and stressful experiences for managers and employees alike.

But they are vital in assessing how employees are doing. Employees who are performing great work are often more engaged, and therefore have higher satisfaction and loyalty levels. (Granted if they are not properly compensated or believe themselves to be so, then satisfaction and loyalty might go out the window.)

Underperforming employees performing poorly are often unhappy, and far less likely to be loyal to the company. A good manager or executive can make the most of the time spent during a one-on-one review and try to understand why the employee is having issues being successful in the organization. However, it’s important to note that if a manager is waiting for an annual or biannual review to address employee performance issues, then it’s probably too late to fix the core problem.

For employees who are performing adequately or exceptionally well, one-on-one reviews are helpful in assessing what skills or training the employee would like, learning their dreams for the future, and providing merit or tenure-based adjustments to their compensation.

In larger organizations, performance reviews can help balance how different departments manage compensation and ensure that high performers are fairly treated regardless of which team they are on.

Employee Net Promoter Score (“eNPS”)

The Net Promoter Score was developed to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty to a company or brand. This measurement was so accurate in assessing customers that it was adopted to gauge an employee’s satisfaction and loyalty as well, by asking roughly the same question: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely is it that you would recommend this company as a place to work?”

An employee who gives a rating of 0-6 is a detractor, 7-8 is passive, and 9-10 is a promoter.

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. This number will end up between -100 and 100. This measurement will give a company-wide scope of how happy employees generally are.

Of course, there are software solutions to automate this process. Operational Customer Experience Management (OCEM) or Customer Feedback Management (OFM) software can be used to automatically take and analyze this feedback at a scalable level, returning comprehensive reports on employee satisfaction, loyalty, and projected growth. Every company has different needs — find the right feedback management software for yours.

When it comes down to loyalty, measuring an employee’s happiness, loyalty, and motivation levels is just the start. If you really want employees to feel heard and prompt more engagement, be sure to visibly take action on their feedback. A company that tries hard to make work a better place for employees will have employees that want to work hard for their company — it’s as simple as that.