Do you want to motivate employees, improve your productivity and profitability, reduce employee turnover, and enhance your organization’s reputation? Employee engagement is the solution.
The business community agrees that employee engagement is essential. Tracking employee engagement allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your organization. But to improve employee engagement, you need the best employee engagement strategies.
In this guide to employee engagement best practices, you will discover what every business should know about putting engagement strategies into action. You will also learn why an enterprise alumni network like Aluminate for Enterprise is the key to boosting employee engagement.
What is employee engagement and why does it matter?
Employee engagement is the concept of creating a highly engaged workforce of satisfied employees. These employees understand their role in the organization and are happy to work there.
Increasing employee engagement increases your productivity and efficiency. Employees will work better together, and individually. They will be happier, knowing they are essential to the company reaching its goals.
The companies with the most engaged employees reap the benefits in everything from customer engagement and satisfaction to profits.
To get the most benefit from employee engagement, you need to know the top employee engagement best practices. They will help you streamline your employee engagement strategies, practically and systematically.
10 best practices to increase employee engagement
Uncertain of where to start with employee engagement? All you need are some practical pointers to implement your employee engagement strategies.
1. Invest in the right platform
The first of the employee engagement best practices is the preparatory stage – the platform. This is where employee engagement starts. The right platform, such as Aluminate for Enterprise, ties the factors that contribute to employee engagement together.
This highly customizable platform provides online collaboration spaces and virtual meeting tools. It can be used for links to professional development opportunities. It also offers an online mentorship program, which is an ideal strategy to increase both employee and alumni engagement.
Users can share company-related updates via the user-friendly dashboard, and access resources with ease from the digital library.
2. Create an employee engagement strategy
Once you have adopted the right platform for your needs, the most important employee engagement best practice is creating an engagement strategy or multiple strategies.
The best employee engagement strategies are dynamic and change with time. Every company, every team, and most importantly, every individual responds to different engagement efforts.
An engagement strategy fulfills several objectives. It assesses the current employee engagement levels, works toward solutions, and implements changes needed for higher engagement. As you see what works best for your workforce, adapt your engagement program accordingly.
3. Conduct regular employee engagement surveys
89% of human resources professionals agree that ongoing feedback about employee expectations is the best way to increase employee engagement.
An employee engagement survey gives you the employee feedback that matters. It will give you insights into employees’ job satisfaction, their experience of their work environment, and how they perceive the company culture. These insights give you data-driven ideas on how to improve employee engagement.
Keep employee surveys short and fun, but do them regularly. Once a quarter is a good bet for measuring engagement and monitoring the success of your various engagement efforts. Follow up on anything that needs further clarification with one-on-one meetings.
Aluminate for Enterprise makes sharing surveys and gathering feedback a breeze. Simply share the surveys on the platform’s digital library, so that your employees have easy access to them.
4. Recognize and reward employees’ achievements
An employee recognition program is one of the top ways to engage employees. When employees feel appreciated at work, it almost always raises employee morale and engagement.
Rather than just the domain of human resources or management, employee engagement and employee recognition is the entire organization’s responsibility. Encourage employees to get involved with peer-to-peer recognition on the company’s social network.
Aluminati’s internal chat features make communication and employee recognition simple. Our Groups feature also allows employees to connect and celebrate one another’s achievements in smaller virtual chats related to their team or department.
5. Streamline the onboarding process
Employee engagement begins at the start of each employee’s journey with your company. When employees feel like a part of the team from their very first day on the job, it is easy to keep them engaged. Give employees a warm welcome by sharing all necessary resources with them and introducing them to the entire team.
An easy-to-use platform like Aluminati streamlines the onboarding process. After creating their profile, new employees have easy access to company group chats, a dashboard of news, and a digital repository of onboarding materials and resources, all in one place.
6. Organize events and team-building activities
Foster employee engagement by creating a space for team bonding. Team-building activities and company events increase employee engagement levels, facilitate teamwork, and build strong business relationships. Some of these can be virtual team-building activities, to allow remote workers to participate.
Too often, workplace politics lead to an employee vs. employer situation. This is not conducive to engagement and can lead to disillusioned and disengaged employees. Include senior leaders, middle managers, and your corporate alumni in company events, to strengthen the feeling of community.
7. Prioritize wellness
When you prioritize workplace wellness, you engage employees. More importantly, you increase their health and will likely see a decrease in days taken off due to sickness. A health and wellness program does not have to be complicated or expensive. All it takes is a bit of ingenuity.
There are several ways to implement wellness programs. You could offer employees health benefits, discounted gym memberships, or training programs.
Include activities for mental wellness too, sharing resources on your network’s digital library
with video tutorials on meditation, deep breathing, and stress-busting techniques. This is an affordable yet impactful employee engagement strategy that takes very little preparation.
8. Offer flexible work arrangements
One of the most popular engagement initiatives in recent years is the move towards a healthier work-life balance. Remote work opportunities or a hybrid work model is often the answer.
If this is not suitable for your particular business environment, there is a simpler solution. Offer more flexible work hours, or an extra day off per month. If that too is not feasible, give employees the chance to go home an hour earlier on a specific day.
With a network like Aluminate for Enterprise, remote and hybrid work is made easy. No matter where they are, team members can communicate and collaborate within virtual group chats and access all necessary resources and company updates from the digital dashboard and repository.
9. Gain insights from exit interviews
Gathering data from resigning employees offers direction for your future engagement initiatives. Highly engaged employees are not as likely to resign, meaning that those who leave without giving clear reasons for doing so are possibly not engaged.
When you conduct exit interviews, ask them why they are leaving, and what could convince them to stay. Are there commonalities between the answers? This will give you clues as to what you should be doing to boost engagement and, as a result, employee retention.
10. Give employees what they want
Finally, listen to your employees and give them what they want, when they want it. There are numerous ways to gain these insights. You can analyze the data from annual “voice of the employee” surveys and quick polls.
Another ideal way to gauge how your employee engagement efforts are performing is through your enterprise platform’s insights module. These insights will help you identify which activities are more engaging than others. This way, you will be able to understand current employee engagement and focus on more engaging activities in the future.
In a world where business budgets are getting tighter and tighter, this strategy can lead to substantial savings.
Boost employee engagement with Aluminate for Enterprise
Improving employee engagement starts with choosing the right platform. This gives you the convenience, practicality, and versatility you need for your engagement strategy. Leading organizations that are serious about employee engagement choose Aluminate for Enterprise as their enterprise social network.
We offer applications from enterprise social networks, to onboarding and engagement platforms, and corporate alumni databases. Request your free demo today and discover what our platform can do for your business.
