If you’re a Human Resources Manager or a senior executive, there’s a good chance maintaining or improving employee engagement is high on your list of your companies 2016 goals.
To help you get the most out of your employee engagement efforts this year, we suggest you consider taking the following three (3) steps:
- Start with well-defined, specific business goals
You don’t just work on employee engagement for the sake of improving employee engagement. You work on employee engagement as a means to drive other business goals.
To make your engagement efforts a success, start with a clear understanding of those business goals. What do you want to do?
Increase employee retention?
Boost productivity?
Improve performance?
Increase customer satisfaction?
Encourage cost saving initiatives and innovation ideas?
Strengthen your corporate culture?
All of these goals are good ones and may be important to your organisation, but you will need to prioritise the outcomes that are most important in 2016, because creating a strategy for each will be labour intensive. You may not have enough time and resources to make progress on all of them.
- Ensure that you are measuring the right things
Measurement is essential to charting your progress toward any goal, and it’s vital to measure the right things from start to finish. The goals you set will determine what you should be measuring.
For example, if you’re focusing on increasing employee retention, you’ll want to understand job satisfaction drivers such as pay, benefits, leadership and work environment. But if you’re focusing on culture, you’ll want to focus on a different mix of factors such as commitment, relationships, communication and leadership.
Make sure you’re measuring the things you’re trying to improve. Ask yourself: Will what I’m measuring help me to be better informed about my goal?
- Take meaningful action
Once you know what you’re trying to accomplish and have measured where you’re at, it’s time to do something about it. To achieve your goals, you have to take meaningful action.
Too often, organisations will survey employees about engagement and stop there. This can harm the organisation whether survey results are positive or negative.
When leaders solicit and receive employee feedback, then never report back to people about the results, it’s the same as requesting payment for something, receiving the money, but delivering nothing in return. Employees who take the time and effort to share their thoughts and then never hear anything more can lose trust in you and your organisation.
To keep that trust and make real progress, as soon as you have the survey results in hand you need to share them with employees and thank them for their help.
Then you need to get busy doing something meaningful with those results – starting by examining them and deciding what you need to stop, start or modify to help drive engagement in your organisation. Ask yourself: How do we apply these results to modify the way we manage our internal programs, policies or practices?
If you’re thinking you have no idea how to apply the information you gather from employees to make a positive change in engagement, you’re not alone. Many companies find themselves in that position. The ones that achieve their goals are the ones who don’t let it slow them down, but it is worth considering the following:
Move ahead slowly
Start small
Experiment with different changes and measure the results.
There may be unintended consequences or things might not work the way you hoped, but don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Even errors will help you learn more and move you closer to your goal.
Brownie Points is owned, developed and supported in Australia, and is rapidly being seen as an employee engagement platform of choice for SME’s, NFP’s and commercial organisations of all sizes and budgets.
To learn how Brownie Points can help you to improve your employee engagement levels in 2016 call the team today on 03 9909 7411 or email us at info@browniepoints.com.au
