Fostering a motivating and engaging company culture has become more important than ever in the age of remote work and distributed teams. With asynchronous work, there’s a danger that remote employees can become disengaged and feel less motivated to give their all to their work. Low employee engagement has been directly linked to low productivity and performance– not only will your eNPS suffer, but so will your business’s health.
The challenge that managers and HR professionals face today is ensuring better engagement, productivity, and performance in their employees while working remotely.
‘To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace.” aptly said
Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup, HR professionals and managers can use HR strategies to reinvigorate their teams and boost performance.
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There are many strategies to help improve employee engagement and, therefore, performance.
- Investing in professional development
- Prioritizing employee health & wellness
- Recognizing and rewarding employees for their work
- Encouraging frequent feedback from peers and managers
- Communicating consistently and authentically
Companies can use many methods to help foster employee engagement and maintain a high-performance culture. Increased employee engagement has been directly linked to higher job satisfaction and productivity. Many companies choose a versatile software like the OKR tool, task management, performance management to improve employee engagement.
Professional development
As you probably already know, simply hiring someone may not be enough to boost the performance of a specific department of your company. In this case, you have to rely on training.
Training sessions are essential for employees to help them identify their mistakes and know how to make adequate improvements. These training sessions increase job satisfaction and help employees reach their performance goals effectively. Employees are more confident in their skills and knowledge that the company is investing in their professional development, which can increase employee engagement.
Bonobos, an established retail industry for eCommerce products, offers various training programs for its employees. These include “Fit For Success,” which focuses on employee performance management, and “Know Your Customer,” which trains employees to understand the customer experience better. These training sessions have helped employees manage different skills and increase their engagement, efficiency and productivity.
How can the effectiveness of training sessions metric be improved?
Employees often avoid corporate training programs because these sessions turn into tedious, time-consuming conferences instead of offering practical suggestions. You can make training sessions fun and engaging by
- Taking feedback from your employees. Ask them which skills they think they need to learn to impact their productivity significantly
- Bring in industry leaders for lunch discussions to make sessions more interactive
- Offering employee development opportunities as incentives to increase participation in the training session.
Apart from training and development, employees can be encouraged to attend professional certification courses in their fields of expertise.
Employee health & wellness
Research shows that employees in good health are more likely to perform better in the workplace. Healthy employees have a better quality of life and a lower risk of disease, illness, and injury, increased work productivity, and a greater likelihood of contributing to their communities. Employee health and wellness mainly address normal stresses, work productively, and realize one’s highest potential. Organizations endeavor to achieve a work-life balance and improve employees’ overall health. Additional wellness benefits include recognition, paid time off, leadership training, and community volunteer projects that improve well-being and workplace engagement are also addressed by organizations to improve employee engagement.
Some wellness activities include
- Wellness events (e.g., walking, nutrition, and resilience programs).
- Wellness Services (e.g., screening, health coaching).
- Wellness Training. (e.g., online assessments, learning modules, corporate values. training programs)
Recognition and rewards
Regular feedback sessions are great for building engagement and meaningful relationships with employees. Organizations can take a step further by recognizing their accomplishments with rewards. For example, gamification, publicly praising employees, and even personalized thank-you notes can go a long way in making employees feel appreciated and like their contribution means something.
Organizations can use an employee reward and recognition platform to make life easier. Doing so can not only help enhance your company culture, but it can also offer employee rewards that recognize their contributions and incentivize them to keep being great.
Frequent feedback from peers and managers
Another important component of employee engagement is performance review comments and feedback. When employees get more feedback on their work performance, they feel that their work matters, and their managers pay attention to their contributions. When employees feel valued, they’re more engaged and productive. Great performance review comments and feedback come from HR professionals and managers.
Optimizing employee performance requires an in-depth understanding of how your team works and how the leader prioritizes every individual’s growth and development. This is possible by promoting an environment that is conducive to boosting productivity.
Goldman Sachs, a company founded in 1869, transformed its traditional system of assessing employee performance management by “providing high-quality and constant ongoing feedback” that, the CEO claims, is the company’s main driving force.
Tracking the progress of employees is paramount. But it isn’t enough to ensure long-term growth and development. Whether a team member is doing well or needs improvement, provide feedback to guide them toward completing their goals. This also encourages them to give their best and stay productive.
Here are some valuable tips when structuring a dual-feedback system:
- Employees should be trained to keep boundaries between their personal and professional lives. Any feedback they give the other should not be unsolicited or unrelated to work performance.
- Make sure everyone knows how to offer “specific” feedback. Merely saying, “Your work needs to be improved,” can leave an employee confused about which aspect of work needs to be improved. Managers should be specific about their needs and should be able to communicate them.
- Positive feedback is as necessary as corrective feedback. If managers keep giving corrective feedback without encouragement, employees will likely lose motivation to put in additional effort.
Communicate consistently and authentically.
Every organization wants engaged employees who are committed and likely to stick around. But as sweeping industry disruption, mergers and increasingly demanding customers consume our attention, employee engagement often takes a back seat.
The link between job engagement and internal communication is becoming more apparent. The top reasons employees quit their jobs are often related to communication. Poor communication could be a lack of clear direction from management or constant change that is not well communicated.
Final Thoughts
Improving engagement ripple effect on employee job satisfaction, customer experience, company credibility, and profitability. Planning well for it and using the right tools to measure employee engagement is essential. The data you get will be authentic and actionable in improving engagement. One of the best ways to measure employee engagement is through the OKR framework . They are meaningfully framed Objectives and Key Results designed and tracked to improve business performance. The definition of OKR is to set objectives for the future and measure those objectives with Key Results. Objectives are the broad goals of a company, department, or person, and the key Result is the success measurement of that objective.
Author Bio:
Sasi Dharan, Marketing Manager, Profit.co,
In his current role, he leads the Digital Marketing Team. He has a decade of experience in Project management, Operation Excellence Consulting, and Digital Marketing.
He is passionate about creating new approaches to brand awareness and demand generation. He is passionate about learning new technologies and strategies in marketing and deploying them in his organization. He is also an avid traveler and a biker who has traveled almost 7000miles in a year.
Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasiceo
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