How Do You Build a Team of Engaged Employees?
It’s a question that many good business owners and leaders should (and typically) do care about. Why? Happy workers who are thoroughly engaged with the company are much more likely to contribute to the business, generate more overall brand visibility, and help increase profitability.
However, even having a great business culture and a team of happy workers, does not mean that all employees are actually engaged in the business. What you ultimately want is employees who are both Happy and Engaged. Below are four ways to build a team of highly engaged employees and improve overall employee engagement.
Know Your Employees
One of the best tips for any business owner or leader is to get to know their employees on a more personal level. Whether it is about their current jobs, their thoughts on the company, or just their own interests outside of the company. Creating an environment that is positive and where employees feel they can connect with their business leaders creates a stronger work environment. Granted, for companies that have thousands of employees, this may be a bit more difficult to achieve.
Yet, having open floor discussions with different departments, making it clear employees can reach out at any time, offering to hear ideas or thoughts about particular areas of the business will drive a much more positive and engaged workplace. And when team members feel appreciated or that their ideas are being valued, they are much more likely to talk up the brand, share content, and truly be engaged with the company by becoming a brand ambassador. As a business leader, make that effort to truly care about your employees.
Company Transparency
Along with getting to know your employees, providing transparency into the company is also valuable to keep your team fully engaged. When a business hides or does not find sharing information about business performance, new hires, overall revenue, new features or products important, employees can feel disconnected and feel like they are left in the dark about what is going at the company. Even if the company news is negative, providing full transparency into the company will help provide a trust into the company and the leaders running it.
One great example of transparency in the workplace is the social media scheduling tool, Buffer. The company has an entire blog related to transparency into the company, which includes their formula for salaries, their pricing model, overall revenue, and more.
They even posted an article when they had to lay off a portion of their staff, the mistakes they made, and how they were moving forward to ensure this would not happen again. Although it was not the best news to share, the CEO and company faced the mistakes head on and the article went viral. This then actually drummed up more business and even generated more interest from people looking to work for the company (remember, they just wrote about layoffs!).
While not all companies need to provide this level of detail on their website, finding a way to share this information with employees or making it apparent that this data is accessible, will increase the level of engagement and trust with your employees.
Right Tools & Resources
You want to make participating, sharing, and learning super easy for your employees, especially if you want them to become social marketers and brand ambassadors. By this, it can be a few things including social guides, toolkits, case studies of the company, etc. These types of resources help teach employees what your company is working on or why it is useful for customers, thus educating your employees. Providing a simple portal of information makes it easier for employees to share the same insight.
Along with having access to quality resources, is having a tool in place that makes it easier for employees to share the right appropriate content on their social accounts.
For example, an employee advocacy platform can create the perfect hub for all company content you may want employees to share. These platforms provide a quick way to have all the content you may want employees to share in one central location, along with analytics, and creating an easier way to boost brand visibility.
Companies that have realized employee engagement can be boosted by these platforms include Dell, Genesys, Kelly Services, and more.
Incentives
Who doesn’t love some cool incentives? Creating a challenge for your employees and offering some sort of prize in a given timeframe can boost employee engagement. Maybe it’s a cash prize, extra vacation day, half day, gift cards, etc. The potential rewards are endless, but these can motivate your team to do more for your company.
Again, this comes back to the employee advocacy platform example, EveryoneSocial has a leaderboard and gamification feature that tallies the top people who have the most shares of content and the largest viral reach. At the end of each month, quarter, or year, you could provide a prize for the top employee.
This will not only get people sharing more company content, but engaged with what they are sharing and posting on their social channels more often. Companies that have some sort of recognition programs in place have about 31 percent lower voluntary turnover than companies without such programs.
Final Thoughts
Building a team of engaged employees is not necessarily easy, but something every company and business leader should make sure is in place. It also might not be possible to include all four of the above recommendations, but even starting with one will go a long way for the health of your company. Remember, driving brand visibility and boosting leads is all accessible through highly engaged employees.
Dell has driven more than 150,000 shares within EveryoneSocial that have yielded 45,000 clicks to Dell’s website in the first 12 months. In total, the reach has exceeded an audience of 1.2 million. Want to see EveryoneSocial in action? Request your personalized demo here.
