HR Strategy for 2021 – Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is several things: it’s how committed your employees are to doing their job, it’s your employees looking forward to coming to work rather than dreading it, it’s your employees doing their job because they want to rather than just to get paid and it’s your employees feeling appreciated by you the employer.

There are advantages to promoting employee engagement, the most obvious being that if your employees like working for you they will be more efficient, willingly putting in the hours and meeting deadlines. A secondary advantage would be the atmosphere in the office being a hopeful one, which will help your mental health and that of your employees in the long run.

How do you promote employee engagement?

Show them you care: Listen to their grievances when they emerge and then go on to address these grievances. Have a list of issues that have arisen and communicate when you have fixed these issues in a timely manner, with clear visible results.

Involve your employees in how the business is run: Rather than simply giving out tasks and taking sweeping decisions that will affect them, gather your employees and ask for their opinions on matters concerning the business. It’s likely that by having brainstorming sessions and village town hall meetings, you’ll become aware of solutions you didn’t consider. In the long run, the fact that you took the time to consider their opinions will make them feel appreciated.

Give them a safe space: Some employees will – regardless of how friendly you are as an employer – be disinclined to truly discuss their feelings or ideas in your presence. By creating an anonymous space where employees can freely discuss among themselves, you create a refuge for them in what might otherwise feel like a hostile work environment.

Be understanding: While the objective of every business is making a profit, you should not make a profit by running your employees ragged. When creating contracts, have reasonable off time and enough breaks during work.

As a closing remark, while you should try to increase employee engagement, make sure that you are sincere about it. Attempting to artificially encourage employee engagement through methods that benefit the company more than the employee will always be exposed. At best, in that scenario, your employees will work while feeling used, and at worst you will lose your employees to your more considerate competitors.

Do you have your Employee Engagement Strategies for 2021? Or are you slightly confused as to how to begin? Reach out to us on info@kimberly-ryan.net and we will be glad to design bespoke strategies that speak to your culture and workforce.