Working in an environment with engaged employees can be the difference between working in your dream job and a temporary solution. If your employees do not feel connected to their jobs then they are likely to switch employers in the future. You want your employees to care and feel motivated to get out of bed in the mornings. Keep your employees happy and they will produce their best work.
Studies have shown that engaged teams are three times more likely to outperform unengaged teams. If people feel their work is recognised they are 33% more likely to feel innovative. Each individual can provide more profit annually if you, as an employer, invest resources into employee engagement.
Here are five tips and tricks to help improve employee engagement
If employees feel that their work is valued and they get on with their co-workers, the motivation to come to work every day will be high. A way to increase this motivation is to put some time aside for employees to get to know each other on a personal level. This might mean organising some fun events outside of the office. We recently took the Flare team to play Laser Tag, where teams of employees were formed, who don’t necessarily work together on a day to day basis, but worked together to strategically plot against each other in Laser Tag. It doesn’t have to be outside of the office, we also had a ping pong tournament going for 1-2 months with the Grand Finale still to come. On a more serious note, we also like to make sure our employees feel valued and so we celebrate each other’s wins. Employees can either nominate their own wins or nominate colleague’s wins, which are then presented to the rest of the business every two weeks over casual Friday drinks.
These initiatives have been an extremely successful way of creating a great vibe and culture in the company.
2. Empower your employees
It is important that your employees feel like they are being heard and their opinions are valued. This can be done with regular employment feedback and allowing employees to identify what is working, what might not be working and figure out how and where to make changes. We value such feedback as we want our employees to grow as people and want them to have the best learning experience possible. Therefore, our feedback sessions are always a two-way conversation about what they want to achieve and how to go about achieving it.
3. Show appreciation
Your employees work hard to accomplish their tasks and reach their goals, so when credit is due, it is important to say thank you. Everyone likes to be praised for a job well done and it can further motivate your employees to continue the hard work. If managers can make employees feel valued and appreciated then they are more likely to stay with your company. Another initiative we take to achieve this, is to have a developers sprint every Friday lunchtime. Our developers work super hard to achieve our ambitious goals and they deserve a big round of applause, so every other Friday lunch we order in Pizza for the whole Flare team and the Development team takes us through their work.
4. Provide development opportunities
These days, professional development and progression is extremely important to the workforce. People want to feel like they are learning, progressing and moving forward. When employees feel the company cares about their professional development, it incentivises them to learn. One way to do this is to set out a clear progression path for employees so that they understand what skills and experiences are needed to move forward. This can be fairly straight forward for larger businesses, but in a startup, it might not be so easy to map out such a path, as the business grows and evolves. We realise at Flare, being a startup, that we have an incredibly diverse talent pool with a plethora of skills. And whilst we may not be able to set out an employee’s entire path, as it is subject to change as the business grows, we do believe it is incredibly important to learn from one another.
For example, our Marketing team has set up a weekly skills workshop, in order to learn skills from one another; one week it might be the basics of HTML, the next week it might be a workshop on graphic design tools. Everyone has something they are good at and our point is to make sure we are all sharing our knowledge with one another, so that we not only grow as people within the business, but that the business grows with us.
5. Exit interviews
When employees leave, it is sometimes due to factors that are out of our control. But often it is due to something that could have been addressed or fixed. This is why, at Flare, we put so much emphasis on our feedback sessions; we hope to nip any problems in the bud, before it even gets to the stage that an employee is unhappy in their position. But if it does get to the point that they want to leave, conducting exit interviews can be a great way to figure out what exactly went wrong in order to avoid such situations to reoccur. It is also an opportunity to identify what they did like and what might need improving, allowing you to constantly grow, improve and innovate.
By following some of these steps and examples you can increase employee engagement, take your employee’s wellbeing into account, which will lead to overall better retention rates.
