Employee engagement has been a critical area of concern for many HR professionals across the globe. A highly engaged workforce is a productive workforce. This is turn leads to higher profitability, productivity and peak performance. How to ensure high employee engagement levels of employees within an organisation, if employees do not enjoy what they do for a living.
It is alarming news for many employers and HR managers alike, that disengaged employees do not just affect the confidence, morale and discourage motivated employees, but also bring down the productivity levels of the team as a whole.
How to know if the workforce is highly engaged? Here are top 10 ways to measure employee engagement levels and thus deliberate on strategies to motivate the team, drive performance and empower companies to achieve their long-term business growth objective.
The foremost step to understand and measure employee engagement levels is to check the culture of the company, if it provides employees means to work for not just money, but job satisfaction as an imperative to motivating efforts and driving performance. If the job offers enriching experience to employees, then the employee engagement levels are taken care of here.
Most employees are dissatisfied owing to lack of communication with the top line managers and direct supervisors. In case the relationship with the senior management, team leaders and employees are amicable, then the employee engagement levels could be ensured.
One of the key tools to retain talented workforce within an organisation is to provide them the right tools and opportunities for career advancements. If a skilled employee finds themselves stagnated for long in a job role, they tend to lose interest which leads to attrition within companies.
Hence immediate line managers and supervisors should ensure that career advancement opportunities are provided to all employees to keep them engaged and make them stay with a company for long.
If an employee is provided recognition in their peer groups, they feel motivated to perform which ensures employee engagement. In case HR managers, overlook the need for peer recognition then employees do not feel valued for their contributions and this amounts to job dissatisfaction. These employees tend to look for opportunities outside their current job role, wherein their efforts are appreciated, rewarded and recognised.
See: How to Drive Employee Engagement Levels at Work?
Employee engagement surveys help measure the satisfaction of employees taking into account many factors such as – workplace environment, culture, job role, opinions regarding staffers, opportunities for growth, learning experience and much more.
To keep employees highly engaged, HR managers should keep an eye on the recent attrition happening in a business unit or job role within the company. Seek for answers such as immediate manager’s attitude or lack of career growth prospects to discover reasons on why talented workforce quit.
If the turnover seems to increase, then it is a red flag for the human resource personnel to indicate that the employee engagement levels are very low. This means to say that most of the employees reporting to work are highly disengaged.
The levels of absenteeism of employees within every department should be monitored by HR managers to measure employee engagement. High levels of absenteeism indicate that the employee is less engaged in supporting the company’s growth vision and is dissatisfied with their current job role.
If the levels of quality deliverables are low, then the employee is less likely to be engaged in his job function to support long-term organisational growth objectives.
It is important for immediate line managers and human resource personnel to develop a healthy two-way communication with staffers to measure their sense of belonging and responsibility towards their job role and organisation vision. If the communication process is only one way, it means the employees are hardly engaged in what they do.
Gamification can be one of the tools to measure employee engagement. The right strategic games are also helpful to motivate talented workforce, which in turn results in higher performance and productivity. Gamification as an employee engagement tool is incredibly effective in driving active employee participation and this activity can be linked to measure business value.
The best way to measure employee engagement is to ask employees what they think about their current jobs, the workplace culture, environment, colleagues and suggest scope for improvements.
HR managers can seek answers through informal discussions with employees, who seem perhaps disengaged or conduct company-wide surveys to understand the right and wrongs from an employee’s perspective. Ask the right questions to derive at the right answers and measure accurate employee engagement levels.
Also read: What will be the future of Employee Engagement?
