Everything You Need to Know About Employee Engagement

A major challenge faced by a majority of organizations these days is to create high levels of employee engagement and commitment. Employee Engagement works as a catalyst for HR Managers to ensure successful modern businesses, as it indicates how committed your workforce is to the organization. It refers to the kind of dynamics or relationship that the two share with each other.

Employee engagement is when one feels totally included as a team member, being focused on clear goals, being trusted and empowered, having regular and constructive feedback, being supported in acquiring new abilities, and being praised and recognised for accomplishments.

Employee engagement cannot be achieved through a mechanistic method that manipulates employees' commitment and emotions. This is because employees can soon see through such methods and often tend to get disappointed.

The more personally invested you are in something, the more it matters to you. Improving employee engagement necessitates equal efforts from all members of the leadership team. This combined with an effective engagement strategy necessitates careful preparation. Don't let this stop you, because a highly engaged workforce would increase profitability, efficiency, and employee retention, taking your organization to the next level.

What is employee engagement?

Employee Engagement is defined as the emotional involvement and attachment that employees have with their organization. Positive attitudes and behaviors lead to enhanced business outcomes in a way that triggers and reinforces one another. This is pretty much what employee engagement is all about. Employee involvement refers to company actions that are in line with the company's ideals. It is about promises that were kept or even an explanation for why they couldn't be maintained.

Let’s break this concept down a little into something simple. You become a bigger stakeholder in whatever it may be, be it your kids, your health, or your career. And you will be far more likely to put more into it if the result is worthwhile to you. Employee engagement is founded on an organization's members' trust, integrity, two-way commitment, and communication.

It's a strategy that helps businesses succeed by improving organizational and individual performance, productivity, and well-being. It is quantifiable. It ranges from mediocre to excellent. The same goes for your employees as well. The more personally invested they are in their work, the more it matters to them and encourages them to keep contributing more. This is an amazing way to raise everyone's level of personal investment, paving the way for more and more positive contributions to the organization.

How important is employee engagement for your organization

Did you know that engaged employees outperform other employees by up to 202%? 

Pretty mind-boggling right! Well, it's true.

Effective Employee Engagement leads to the emotional investment of employees in your company, going above and beyond what is needed and thus, delivering exceptional results.‍

Employee engagement is so much more than just a  fancy foosball table in the break room or flashy perks like flexible work hours. Employees who are truly engaged are more likely to produce their best work every day and stay with a company that prioritizes employee engagement. 

Have you ever wondered why exactly is employee engagement so crucial for your workplace? 

Well, here’s why:

Boosts productivity:

Various studies have proven that employees who are invested in their jobs are more productive than those who are not. Apart from this, employees who are engaged are also said to be 21 percent more productive than those who are not. Finding ways to engage your employees, whether through a challenge or more responsibility, means you're also increasing the productivity of your company. In a nutshell, it benefits everyone involved.

Customer satisfaction at its best

Why and how is it that people who are passionate about their work are often the best people to interact with your customers. Well, that’s probably because passion is infectious and your customers can never go without taking notice. When your employees are engaged in the best possible manner, they tend to put in a lot more effort, translating into buzzing productivity levels at your organization, almost in no time! Those who believe in the importance of assisting customers and who believe they are respected by their employer are considerably more likely to provide a better customer experience and boost satisfaction.

A sign of success

This does not necessarily just mean business success. Rather, it is crucial to understand that engagement is usually the result of personal or team success.

In other words, engaged employees are engaged not because they’re productive or easy to work with, but because they feel valued and that their work matters. And when their successes are recognized by everyone else in the organization, your people will feel like they have succeeded in making a meaningful impact at work.

A fast-growing body of research demonstrates that employee engagement is a huge mover of fundamental metrics like retention and revenue. This is probably why senior executives and CEOs try their best to grasp and reap the bottom-line benefits of employee engagement to the organization.

Enhances culture

You would have noticed that people who are often engaged in what they do are, in general, easier to work with! Turns out, that’s true!

When you focus on the wrong things, not knowing how to consistently raise the level of personal investment by your employees is one humongous flaw that comes in the way and ends up ruining things for your organization.

In order to understand what motivates the personal investment of an employee, you will first need to understand how motivation even works, ie, what makes your employees feel good about work. This will lead to enhancing the culture of your organization even better.

How to measure employee engagement?

Some things are pretty easy to measure. This is because they are concrete. 

For example, the time it takes you to drive to your office or the number of red lights you can hit without being late! When it comes to employee engagement it is a bit more difficult. It isn’t concrete and is influenced by quite a few factors. An engagement survey would be just what you would need to know if you’re on the right track. 

However, keep in mind that it is not a place for random questions or curiosities. It is a designed measurement mechanism with several important components that represents the behaviors or feelings of an engaged employee. These questions typically measure several perceptions including organizational pride and advocacy. 

A survey question that depicts the behaviors or sentiments of an engaged employee is referred to as an engagement outcome. These questions are used to gauge feelings of organizational pride, commitment, and advocacy. The current status of employee involvement within your firm might be revealed through these outcomes. Keep in mind that these shouldn't just identify specific actions. Instead, they should be able to identify targets that your organization should maintain or improve.

Top 20 survey employee engagement survey questions 

1. How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends and family?

2. Do you plan to continue at this company in the next two years?

3. Do you feel comfortable contributing your ideas and opinions in our workplace?

4. Do you feel comfortable asking for help if you do not have the skills required to meet your day-to-day goals?

5. Do you feel like coworkers give each other respect here?

6. Do you feel aligned with the goals of the company?

7. Do you feel that the vibe of the workplace is positive and motivating for you?

8. Do you have the basic amenities to feel comfortable at work?

9. Do you think your organization operates in a socially responsible manner?

10. Are you recognized fairly for your contribution to team efforts?

11. Do you feel like this is a good place for you to develop your career?

12. Do you understand how exactly your role correlates to the company’s success?

13. Are you satisfied with the current benefits that the company offers?

14. Do you find your job role fun and challenging?

15. How prominent is office politics in your workplace?

16. Do you think that your company’s wellness policies are enough?

17. Do you receive meaningful rewards on special days like Work Anniversary, Birthdays,etc?

18. Are you provided enough time and the right resources to do your job well?

19. Do you have fun at your workplace?

20. Do you often find yourself working on weekends and holidays?

When should an organization measure employee engagement?

There is no such thing as the perfect time when it comes to measuring employee engagement. An employee engagement survey can be conducted at any time. While the timing of an engagement survey has an impact on survey outcomes, it always helps to discover the rate of engagement of your employees.

It's time to move past contentment and start talking about how to cultivate an engaged workforce. Staff happiness does not always equate to employee engagement. Employee pulse surveys are often conducted on a monthly or weekly basis. These are simpler, more routine employee opinion surveys, usually consisting of 10-15 questions and taking no more than a few minutes to complete. 

The easiest way to follow up and monitor progress from your baseline engagement survey results is to conduct a pulse survey.

A long survey often tends to repeat a question which is why daily surveys are considered to be the most effective when it comes to surveys and measurement of employee engagement. By simply asking a single question every single day, consistently you can get valuable, accurate feedback that will boost your engagement levels even with a time constraint.

Key benefits of measuring Employee Engagement

Tackle obstacles

Measuring engagement on a regular basis will help you tackle obstacles before they become problems. Engagement data can be used to showcase what’s going well and connect weaker departments to stronger ones. Always remember that problems only get big when you let them. There’s no point wondering why your employee retention and sales suddenly plummet if you don’t put in the effort to take care of it.

Build trust

It also helps to build trust, for the plain reason being -asking for feedback from employees shows that you care about their opinions and how they feel at work. The data can be further shared with everyone in your organization -leaders, managers, and employees, giving each individual an opportunity to help contribute to a better culture. Trusted employees feel more valued which in turn helps them feel more engaged. A survey conducted by PwC showed that trusted employees are 76% more engaged than those who work in a low-trust workplace.

Opportunity for Improvement

Surveys provide a clear picture of employee activity and thinking, in a single moment in time, as they struggle to think up thorough answers and complete the questionnaire to get back to work. It is important to encourage employees to keep track of their thoughts and feelings weekly and make sure they speak up. 

Employee engagement surveys are used to determine how motivated and engaged your staff are to give their best at work every day. You can learn about employees' ideas and opinions on their jobs and the entire environment by conducting these questionnaires.

Switch to better measurement tools whenever needed, especially employee-preferred ones. This will help to increase opportunities for improvement and engagement.

Helps to create morale

In order to reap benefits, it is important that you make employee morale a top priority in your company. As employee morale rises, productivity rises, enabling you to keep your employees for a longer period of time. Keep in mind to engage workers in constructive dialogue as they become disengaged. This doesn't even have to last the whole lunch hour; even a quick check-in would demonstrate that you care. This way you will be able to gain a better understanding of your employees' concerns as well.

Main Components of employee engagement

Employee engagement consists of elements that an organization needs to support in order to have a truly engaged team. People often believe that engagement is only about organizing team-building activities and providing their workforce a generous compensation. While this may promote short-term engagement, at the end of the day, the truth is that it just isn’t enough. If you wish to build highly engaged global teams, here are a few of the key components of employee engagement that should not be overlooked.

Leadership 

Employees yearn for meaningful relationships with their supervisors. 

Did you know that receiving praise from a direct boss is nearly twice as successful as offering workers stock options in terms of empowering them? And it's all for free! 

Achieving employee engagement is a commitment that starts with leadership. In order to get every individual to contribute their best efforts, leaders must have the ability to recognize the factors that cause employees to participate and those that cause them to disengage.

Employee Incentives and recognition

Employee recognition, also known as Social Recognition is nothing but the act of publicly acknowledging your employees for who they are and what they do. With employee recognition, workers recognize each other and make the workplace feel more inclusive and human. More than three-quarters of employees stated in a survey that if they were noticed and recognized more, they would work harder. This can be done even in a formal manner, such as years of service or employee-of-the-month schemes, or informal practices, such as business "points" or even small thank-you cards.

Culture and communication

It is a given, that employees who want to come to work every morning, have a good workplace culture. Always keep in mind that, the more prosperous the business is, the greater the atmosphere is.

Do you want to know what makes a good manager? 

Well, you can begin with effective communication. Ensure that you interact with your employees in a transparent, frank, and frequent manner.

Vision and Values

Employees who are deeply engaged in what they do are aware of the larger picture and how they fit into it. Employees should unite around a clearly communicated vision and declaration of core values. They are also much more likely to go above and beyond and contribute to a larger cause if they feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves.

How to Improve Employee Engagement?

In today’s digital era, monitoring and improving employee engagement is easier than ever before. There is a plethora of employee engagement tools, software, and platforms that you can implement to keep tabs on your workforce engagement. 

Surveys show that employees who are supervised by Highly Engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged than those supervised by Actively Disengaged managers.

In case you’re still not convinced, here are a few practices you can adopt at your workplace, to watch your employee engagement rate reach the skies. Here’s how you can achieve this at your workplace. 

Prioritize feedback

Positive manager reviews are associated with optimal levels of feedback. It is always a given that managers who offer too much input to their direct reports are scored higher by their team than those who do not provide enough. 

So what exactly is the bottom line then? Well, employees thrive on feedback, and it does have a significant impact on their level of commitment to the organization.

Many successful leaders consider employee feedback to be one of the most important techniques for professional development – claiming that companies who take a strategic approach to employee feedback can build employee confidence, increase employee satisfaction, and even improve organizational inefficiencies.

Create volunteering opportunities

Employees deserve to realize that they work for an organization that is concerned with having a positive impact on society. Volunteering brings employees together for the greater good and allows them to engage on a deeper level. Indeed, workers agree that service events increase productivity more than happy hours and that businesses that support voluntary efforts have a healthier work climate.

Provide flexibility

Employee involvement can be boosted by flexible work schedules and remote work opportunities. This level of adaptability satisfies workers' need for a work-life balance. Employees expect their employers to help them balance job and personal obligations, so make sure you do your bit to keep them happy.

Evaluate processes

Unnecessary activities and incomplete processes can cost your company a lot of money. Employees, on the other hand, find it quite aggravating. Employees turn on cruise control as a result of the extra measures. This is a sign that they are not engaged with their jobs and a sign that cannot be ignored. Analyze each team's processes carefully and search for ways to improve them for long-term success.

Top 5 Employee Engagement Platforms 

1. SuperBeings

SuperBeings allows an individual to measure, analyze, act and even learn with a set of carefully curated, easy-to-use tools that provide the best results when it comes to keeping a track of employee engagement in your organization. This platform takes daily employee feedback on the organization culture, manager’s leadership skills, and the nature of the employee’s role over existing chat systems such as Slack and MS Teams. Using this feedback, it identifies gaps and recommends personalized learning content and the best possible practices to each manager to close the loop from feedback to action. 

With SuperBeings, managers can even set and track priorities and run custom polls to get additional feedback. They can also automate their recurring stand-ups, 1:1 agenda gathering, and more with the help of this platform. This AI-powered solution for companies helps them drive Employee Engagement, building a high-performing culture. The Pro version is for $5 per employee per month.

Pros:

• Easy to use interface
• Amazing Customer Service
• Highly affordable
• Continuous and Real-Time 
• Holistic approach

Cons:

• Being a young platform with a high potential to understand human behavior, it is on the move to update features to meet customer demands and you will have to expect continuous changes.

2. CultureAmp

Culture Amp creates the forum that enables companies to prioritize culture. It aims to provide people with not only a tool, but also the education, network, and other resources they need to do it for themselves in their own business. Also provides top-quality community content such as the blog, whitepapers, webinars, etc. These are great and can help managers and employees improve their skills.

Culture Amp also offers comparable company metrics to show you how you're doing. It also provides benchmarks from similar organizations to show you how you're doing and allows you to track your progress toward company culture develops over time. 

Pricing starts at $4,500 per year for 50 to 200 employees and $10,500 per year for 201 to 2,000 employees.

Pros:

• In-depth reporting.
• Amazing clarity in action for surveys

Cons:

• Does not allow collaborators to complete performance reviews together with ease.
• Admin functionality is not robust.
• Expensive.
  

3. Glint

Glint is a People Success Platform that helps global companies increase employee engagement, grow their people, and optimize business performance by leveraging real-time people data. Glint surveys enable your company to elicit your feedback on a regular basis, listen to your concerns, and turn that information into timely, meaningful action. Employees select an answer from an 11-point scale, 0 to 10. Glint pricing starts at $0.01. They do not provide a free version. 

It is a really simple tool to launch and gain insight into your entire company's satisfaction; along with easy actions to address concerns or weaknesses identified. It allows organizations to take a holistic approach when it comes to engaging talent, developing people, and inspiring them to do their best work. Glint gathers more frequent feedback through pulses, surveys, and anytime channels and then applies cutting-edge analytics to deliver personalized insights and AI-powered recommendations for action to HR teams, leaders, and managers.

Pros:

• Easy and intuitive interface. 
• The dashboards and reports are clear, with the graphs being the best feature.
• Frequent pulse surveys let you provide feedback on an ongoing basis.

Cons:

• One cannot get access to past survey responses.
• Survey responses are not integrated with a company's primary HR platform.
• A little expensive.
  

4. OfficeVibe

Officevibe is a simple and highly effective forum for team growth. It gives managers the tools they need to improve trust, collaboration, and team performance. The platform helps managers get to know their teams by sending out weekly Pulse Surveys that provide confidential, written feedback options. The platform lets managers understand their teams by distributing weekly Pulse Surveys that include opportunities for anonymous, written feedback. It compiles comprehensive Survey Reports and provides tools for making improvements.

Officevibe also supports managers in mastering 1-on-1s by creating a collaborative structure for tough conversations while providing concrete ways to take action on individual and team goals. 

Officevibe pricing starts at $4.00 per user, per month. The software does offer a free version for users to try out as well. 

Pros:

• Provides a good platform for employees to provide anonymous feedback periodically.
• Keeps track of your team engagement continuously, having a zoomed-in approach to different metrics of engagement.

Cons:

• Lack of clarity when it comes to the time span for the metrics.
• Lack of depth and variety in the questions.
  

5. Amber by Infeedo

Amber by Infeedo is a smart AI-enabled bot that assists in real-time management of employee engagement, predicting turnover, and measuring company culture. Amber connects with employees across organizations to gather actionable information for HR in order to improve employee engagement, reduce potential attrition, and get a real-time sense of general sentiment. Communications here are more timely, personalized, and tailored to key milestones in an employee's career, with an emphasis on not only asking questions but also listening and reacting appropriately.

Amber partners with workers from various companies to gather actionable feedback for HR in order to improve employee engagement, reduce future turnover, and get a real-time sense of overall sentiment. The communications are timely, personalized, and tailored.

With Amber, one can now deliver a seamless experience to their employees for every moment that matters to them in the employee lifecycle and remain human at heart. To use Amber's services, inFeedo has an annual pricing structure and the average cost is $25 per user per annum.

Pros:

• The software’s timely reach outs are personalized on a specific milestone in an employee's tenure, making the conversation even more interesting.
• Outstanding reports and insights.

Cons:

• Less satisfactory when it comes to customization.
• Only suitable for lifecycle surveys.

Never underestimate the power of understanding what’s going on between your employees and their peers as only this can help you identify opportunities to align and motivate teams and individuals.

Like Doug Conant rightly said, 

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace

It is now time to get ready for some major wins. 

If you’re looking for a single platform to satisfy all your organizational needs and make the right decisions, SuperBeings would be your one-stop destination to help you shape the right culture for your organization.

Also published at: https://www.superbeings.ai/blog/what-is-employee-engagement