Strategies to Improve Employee Engagement

Strategies to Improve Employee Engagement

The author of employee engagement: The key to the rising performance, Solomon Markos (2019),  

highlights following 10 strategies to enhance employee engagement in any organization.

1.   Start it on day one: Most organizations do have clear new talent acquisition strategies. However, they lack employee retention strategies. Effective recruitment and orientation programs are the primary building blocks to be set on the primary day of the new employee. Managers should take care in pulling out the potential talent of the new employee through effective recruitment. The recently hired employee should be given each general orientation which is related to the corporate mission, vision, values, policies, and procedures, and job-specific orientation such as his/her job duties, and responsibilities, goals and current priorities of the department to which the employee belongs to change him/her to develop realistic job expectations and reduce role conflict that may arise within the future. Once the hiring decision is formed, the manager must guarantee role-talent match when placing an employee during a certain position and exert all managerial efforts needed to retain that talent within the organization.

2.      Start it from the top: employee engagement needs leadership commitment through establishing clear mission, vision and values. Unless the people at the top believe it, own it, pass it right down to managers and employees, and enhance their leadership, employee engagement can never be more than just a “corporate fad” or “another unit of time thing.” Employee engagement doesn't want lip-service rather dedicated heart and action-oriented service from prime management. It needs “Leading by Being example” 

3.    Enhance employee engagement through two-way communication: Managers should promote two-way communication. Employees aren't sets of pots to which pour out concepts without giving them an opportunity to own a say on problems that matter to their job and life. Clear and consistent communication of what's expected of them paves the method for engaged workforce. Involve people, and continually show relevancy their input. Share power with employees through participative decision-making so that they might feel sense of belongings thereby increasing their engagement in realizing it.

4.    Offer satisfactory opportunities for development and advancement: Encourage independent thinking through giving them additional job autonomy so that employees can have an opportunity to form their own freedom of selecting their own best method of doing their job so long as they're producing the expected result. Manage through results instead of making an attempt to manage all the processes by which that result is achieved.

5.    Ensure that employees have everything they have to do their jobs: Managers are expected to form sure that employees have all the resources like physical or material, financial and knowledge resources in order to effectively do their job.

6.      Offer employees appropriate training: facilitate employees update themselves increasing their information and skills through giving applicable training. usually, it's understood that once employees get to understand more about their job, their confidence will increase there by having the ability to figure without much direction from their immediate managers which successively builds their self-efficacy and commitment.

7.   Have strong feedback system: companies should develop a performance management system that holds managers and employees accountable for the amount of engagement they have shown. Conducting regular survey of employee engagement level helps figure out factors that build employees engaged. Once finalizing the survey, it's advisable to see all the factors that driving engagement within the organization, then narrow down the list of factors to specialize in 2 or 3 areas. It's necessary that organizations begin with a concentration on the factors which will create the foremost difference to the employees and place energy around improving these areas because it is also difficult to handle all factors at once. Managers should be behind such survey results and develop action-oriented plans that are specific, measurable, and responsible and time- bound.

8.  Incentives have a part to play: Managers should work out both financial and non-financial advantages for employees who show more engagement in their jobs. Several management theories have indicated that once employees get more pay, recognition, and praise, they tend to exert more effort into their job. There should be a transparent link between performance and incentives given to the employees. 

9.  Build a distinctive corporate culture: companies should promote a powerful work culture during which the goals and values of managers are aligned across all work sections. Companies that build a culture of mutual respect by keeping success stories alive won't only keep their existing employees engaged however additionally they baptize the new incoming employees with this contagious spirit of work culture.

10. Focus on top-performing employees: A study conducted by Watson Wyatt Worldwide in 2004/05 in 60-minute practices of 50 large USA companies shows that high-performing organizations are focusing on engaging their top-performing employees. According to the finding of a similar analysis, what high-performing companies are doing is what high-performing employees are asking for and this reduces the turnover of high-performing employees and as a result leads to top business performance.

Conclusions

To date, there's no usually accepted definition for employee engagement. However, there's growing consensus among the authors that the construct is distinguishable from connected ideas in management such as employee commitment, organizational citizenship behaviour and job satisfaction in such a way that employee engagement clearly reflects the two-way exchange of effort between employees and employers, and it has stretched which means beyond the aforementioned constructs. research on engagement continues to be on its infancy, attempting to come up with more clear-cut and acceptable definition (Imandin, Bisschoff and Botha, 2014).

References

Imandin, L., Botha, C. & Bisschoff, C.A. (2014) A model to measure employee engagement. Problems and Perspectives in Management, 12(4), p.9 [ONLINE]. Available at <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282708038_A_model_to_measure_employee_engagement>.[Accessed on 8^th May 2019].

Markos, S. (2010) Employee Engagement: The Key to Improving Performance. International Journal of Business and Management, 5(12), p.5 [ONLINE). Available at <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.1591&rep=rep1&type=pdf>. [Accessed on 8^th May 2019].