Why Is Employee Engagement Important?
Everything You Need To Know
Employee engagement is about improving the work environment and culture to encourage employees to be more dedicated to company goals and values.
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What Is Employee Engagement?
Effective employee engagement looks like this:
- Employees are happy and excited to work for the company.
- Employees value their roles and contribute to company success.
- Employees value and understand the company mission, goals, and objectives. Likewise, the company understands and values employees’ goals.
However, it’s important to note that it’s not just employees’ happiness or satisfaction that matters, but how it relates to the individual’s and company’s performance and productivity.
Why is employee engagement so important?
Employee engagement is so important to all organizations because having effective strategies in-place helps create a better work culture, reduce staff turnover, increase productivity, build better work and customer relationships, and impact company profits. Yet, it makes employees happier and turns them into your best advocates.
Why engagement matters for people at work
For those working every day, being engaged with their job, company, and colleagues plays a critical role in their overall satisfaction and experience. Employees become more energized and efficient, and they go beyond what’s expected of them. Naturally, this influences their own mental health at work and can positively influence those around them, such as colleagues and customers.
Employee engagement improves work culture, reduces turnover, increases productivity, builds better work and customer relationships, and affects profits. High employee engagement also turns workers into your best advocates.
Why engagement matters at the company level
Generally, employee engagement tends to matter most at the company level because of the impact it has on business operations and profitability. But it also helps leaders understand employee needs, as well as identify ways to improve morale and create better work environments
Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability. – Anne M. Mulcahy, former CEO at Xerox
Benefits Of Employee Engagement
Improved Employer Loyalty
By focusing on employee engagement, you help ensure employers stick around longer. This keeps employee retention high and minimizes employee turnover costs.
Low engagement and disinterest can cause employees to jump ship quickly and often. And just because your employees are not looking for a new job, doesn’t mean they won’t accept a better offer either.
If they care about their work, team members, and company, they’ll be more invested and committed to staying.
Increased Productivity
Engaged employees work harder because they like what they do and believe in their value to the company. Makes sense, right?
If you are interested in something and feel a connection to what you are doing, it is much more likely you’ll do it well and be invested.
In the modern workplace, overall productivity increases by 20-25% when employees are engaged. Yet, this can also quickly be lost due to overworked and stressed employees.
Better Customer Service
Customer service and client success as crucial pieces to any successful business. After all, most businesses rely on growing and maintaining customers.
Employee engagement improves the customer service people receive from your company, which is good for retaining customers, securing upsells, and getting customer referrals.
When employees are happy and engaged, they’re more likely to care about customers and go above and beyond to ensure customers and clients have a great experience.
More Profitability
Highly engaged organizations see an average of 20% higher sales than those that are disengaged.
But if you’re retaining employees, increasing productivity, boosting customer service, it makes complete sense that your sales and profits increase too.
Higher Employee Satisfaction & Happiness:
Employees need to feel satisfied in their work; otherwise, interest and enthusiasm will slip away.
When employee engagement is high, employees feel satisfied with their contributions and impact. They have a connection to their performance and the company they work for. This also leads to overall happiness, which is good for company morale, productivity, etc.
Better Adoption on Company Initiatives:
When your company rolls out new initiatives to boost the business, employees who are engaged are more likely to participate. They’ll value what your company wants to do and happily jump in, meaning adoption rates and long-lasting interest will be high.
Engaged Employees Become Brand Advocates:
When employees are informed and highly engaged, they are also more likely to be brand advocates. They’ll engage in word-of-mouth marketing, share company content on social media, and improve your marketing reach and employer brand.
Employees are the most trusted voice of your company and its services or products. This is referred to as employee advocacy, which will naturally start to occur.
You can also invest in a platform that helps employees stay informed, increases their engagement, and lets employees have access to the best content to share on your company’s behalf. Learn more here.
Research indicates that workers have three prime needs: interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company. – Zig Ziglar
Employee Engagement Tips
These employee engagement tips will help you create a better work environment with happier, more productive people.
Encourage Communication & Conversation.
One of the critical factors in fostering a workplace with high levels of employee engagement is communication, both formal and informal. The important thing is that you have the tools and services in place that allow people to connect with each other with as little friction as possible.
Yet, this also means getting valuable and honest feedback, so your company can make improvements. Communicate how important this is and provide ways for employees to be open and honest.
Make Sure They’re Informed.
If you have more than 50 people in your company, chances are that someone is almost always out of the loop on important news and events. Did you see the CEO’s TV interview? How about that new product that just launched? Are you aware of the new competitor that just popped up? How about that new account you just landed? Invest in keeping your people informed and they’ll feel more invested in your company.
Let Them Share Their Enthusiasm.
People trust the recommendations of their friends and family more than any other type of marketing. Your employees have relationships with a tremendous number of people outside the walls of your company, including customers, prospects, partners, and future hires. Let them shout their enthusiasm for your company from the (social media) rooftops.
Reward The Actions You Want.
We’re talking about ye olde carrot and stick here. You probably have an idea of the kind of engagement you want to see from your people. Put some gamification and light rewards behind them. Even something as simple as a shout-out from an executive can be more than enough. Encourage this behavior by tapping into the power of gamification and incentivizing employees.
Measure Engagement Frequently.
It’s common for companies to send employees an annual anonymous engagement survey, but this isn’t very effective because it doesn’t provide an accurate picture of employee engagement throughout the year.
Here are some excellent ways to measure employee engagement:
- Short frequent surveys
- Meetings with individual employees
- Exit interviews when employees leave
- Employee Net Promoter Score
- Analyzing data in tools you use (adoption)
- Employee turnover rates/absence rates
Employee Engagement Statistics
We’ve pulled out some of the interesting stats we think you’ll benefit from knowing.
To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace. – Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup
Employee Engagement Trends
The idea of employee engagement is not going away and has only grown in value over time. Yet, like anything else, with advances in technology and changes in how we work, there are a few employee engagement trends to pay attention to.
These are the ones your organization should monitor:
- Put more emphasis on employee experience. This means creating more emphasis on creating the best possible work journey for employees, even if they move on in their careers, you want nothing but positive outcomes.
- Flexibility is on employees’ minds more than ever. While remote work and the need for more flexible work has been growing, the pandemic got people thinking about it more as many were required to work from home. While traditional office jobs still exist, employees have higher engagement when given the flexibility to do their best work.
- Embrace technology employees want to use. There’s lots of software on the market, but your organization needs the RIGHT technology to engage its people. You need software like EveryoneSocial that truly drives community.
Employee Engagement Software
Employee engagement software can be a pretty broad category. It can be argued that anything that helps your company and is used by employees could be some form of engagement.
However, employee engagement software and tools are about improving employee experience and engagement through gathering feedback from employees, being able to recognize employee milestones and results, and naturally to build a connected community and workplace.
Employee engagement software is commonly implemented in human resources, communications, or a combo of departments for various use cases within employee engagement.
Below are a few examples of employee engagement software and tools you might want to consider.
Additional Employee Engagement Resources
If you’re interested in boosting employee engagement, keeping employees informed, and improving feedback and knowledge sharing, employee advocacy might be right for you.
Lastly, before we finish, we thought it was worth sharing some additional resources that’ll be useful in expanding your employee engagement knowledge.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is meant by employee engagement?
Employee engagement is a function of the relationship between an organization and its employees. It’s about improving your workplace and culture such that employees feel more connected and dedicated to your company’s goals and values. Employee engagement is based on trust, integrity, and communication between an organization and its members.
How do you increase employee engagement?
Increasing employee engagement in the workplace is not always an easy task, but your company must attempt to. Here are a few ways to improve engagement:
- Encourage open communication.
- Reward positive actions.
- Be transparent.
- Ask for feedback and ideas.
- Enable team collaborations.
- Provide flexible work.
- Hold company outings.
How do you engage employees at work?
In order to engage employees at work, you first have to know what areas your company needs to improve on. Then you can start applying some of these tips below:
- Get to know employees on a personal level.
- Provide them with the tools for success.
- Tell them how the company is doing.
- Give them room to grow professionally.