5 Ways to Focus Your Employee Engagement Efforts

Engagement is one of the biggest challenges at any workplace for corporate communications, HR, internal communication and marketing managers alike. How can you solve the elusive engagement paradigm? We have a few ideas.

Specializing in intranet platforms, an essential employee engagement tool, we see many organizations invest much time, energy and money in employee engagement and workplace feedback solutions, but there is a better way to monitor and gauge your employees’ engagement.

Don’t get me wrong, data is important and the ability to convert survey responses to a metric or a stat can certainly be helpful. But you need to understand that there is no such thing as a magic number that tells you how your workforce feels about their Monday mornings or how they feel about their work life.

You know that relying too much on surveys won’t do the trick, because essentially you’re trying to measure the relationship you have with your people. Employee engagement is about understanding how your people want to put their spirit into what they do and the only way to improve on it is by understanding the focus of your engagement.

What Drives Employee Engagement?

Studies show that there are many drivers to employee engagement, two of which are employee satisfaction and your internal communication strategy.

Employee satisfaction typically focuses too much on one’s immediate work environment factoring in measures such as continuous feedback, one’s recognition, work relationships and the ability to perform job tasks, etc. This approach makes sense and it does impact employees’ day-to-day sense of engagement and connection to their workplace, but that’s not all it takes to heighten, sustained levels of employee engagement.

There is a risk in focusing too much on employee satisfaction or immediate work environment and not balancing your engagement approach. Studying human behavior, we came to learn that it’s almost impossible to maintain the same level of engagement and enthusiasm over a prolonged period unless we understand what drives us, motivates us or what makes us do what we do.

That said, it’s equally important that you instill a purpose-driven engagement strategy where you focus on the “why” and get your team on-board with the reason you do what you do, hence a clear mission and purpose is key. Here is where your internal communication strategy comes to play. There is a significant relationship between effective Internal Communications and positive employee engagement levels.

How Do We Measure Employee Engagement?

When measuring Employee Engagement, you’re trying to measure drivers such as Meaning, Impact and Connection. And there is no way you could measure such drivers other than communicating with your people, involving them in what you do and sharing knowledge about what you do and why you’re doing it. You owe it to your employees to earn their respect, trust and hopefully build a long-term relationship, and you can stay assured that one-size fits all communication will never relate to your people on a personal level.

Bonzai Intranet is designed to drive the most valuable kind of engagement and reduce the risk of one-sided employee engagement approach through communications. Bonzai Intranet’s Stress-Free communication features are for all types of communications, such as line, peer and team management communications, not just communications between supervisors and employees.

The 5 ways to Create & Sustain High Levels of Employee Engagement:

1. Share relevant information and empower your team with timely, Targeted Communications –Target your content by topics, location or any tag with extensive content management tools.
2. Publish and share content highlighting important communications with News and Announcements
3. Promote personal connections and build a work community with Social Workplace and other engagement features like feedback and social chatter.
4. Build a culture of recognition with Employee Spotlight and Recognition features.
5. Plan, organize and publicize fun events and meetings that foster participation and collaboration from everyone across the entire organization with Integrated Events Planning.

Of course, content is a key factor in driving your successful internal communication strategy, and we at Bonzai enjoy helping organization create intranet content that will engage your people.

Still have questions about Employee Engagement tactics? Please comment below or email [email protected].