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Employee Engagement Plan can be a crucial tool to retain happy and productive employees.
Q: What is Employee Engagement?
A: Employee engagement is a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organisation to give of their best each day, committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being.
Done properly, this can massively increase your employee retention which in turn will improve the performance of your organisation as your staff will have the depth of knowledge that can often only be attained through length of service.
Happy and productive people equals growth and profit.
Choosing the right tools with which to engage your employees is of the utmost importance. Employee engagement cannot be achieved by a mechanistic approach which tries to extract discretionary effort by manipulating employees’ commitment and emotions. Employees see through such attempts very quickly and can become cynical and disillusioned.
Q: How do I get it right?
A: The four key ingredients of a happier, more motivated and more productive workforce are:
- leaders with a vision who value how individuals contribute
- line managers who empower rather than control their staff
- values that are lived and not just spoken, leading to a sense of trust and integrity
- employees who have the chance to voice their views and concerns.
How you engage your staff is going to be very different in each organisation. There is no one size fits all.
A first practical step in fostering employee engagement is to assess – and in large organisations, preferably measure – employee attitudes. Many large employers in both private and public sectors conduct regular employee attitude surveys, often alongside focus groups or other forums to gain employee insight. Composite employee engagement measures are also commonly used to identify areas for improvement and understand organisation specific factors which influence engagement.