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Enhance Your Bottom Line with These 5 Employee Engagement Strategies

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Employee Engagement Strategy|Enhance Your Bottom Line with These 5 Employee Engagement StrategiesEmployee engagement is vital to the success of your company. Engaged employees work harder, stay with your company longer, and produce better results. It might cost you a little more money to create an environment that encourages strong employee engagement, but it’s well worth it in terms of the benefits it can have for your company culture and, yes, your bottom line.

But what exactly does it take to boost employee engagement in a meaningful way? You need to make sure you foster strong work-life balance among your employees, give them the tools they need to succeed in your company and in their careers, and give the recognition employees need to feel seen and heard.

1) Make Time Off Mandatory – And Give More of It

You might think that having employees at their work stations more often would result in more and better work. But the opposite is the case. Employees who slog through weeks and months without any time off get burnt out, and lose their enthusiasm for the work. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your employees have time for rest and self-care.

When employees have time to recharge, they’re 31 percent more productive at work and make 37 percent more sales. Revenues and creative output triple when employees are well-rested. That’s reason enough to make time off mandatory and give employees plenty of it – above and beyond the 10 days that the average employee gets. Work hours have been increasing over the past three decades, with many professionals feeling increasingly pinched for time in which to take vacations, handle family emergencies, attend to their mental health, and so on. Mandatory time off gives employees a much-needed sense of time affluence, and can ease feelings of burnout.

2) Recognize Achievements, Anniversaries, and Milestones

Who doesn’t want to be congratulated when they do well, or when they have an important milestone happen in their lives – including a work anniversary? Employee anniversary recognition helps employees feel seen, especially when deployed in connection with proud recognition of everything else an employee does to make the company a success. Recognizing employee achievements, anniversaries, and milestones (like births, marriages, or graduations) and employment anniversaries motivates your top employees and injects a fresh sense of engagement into the workforce as a whole.

3) Give Employees the Tools and Support They Need to Succeed

You can’t expect your employees to succeed at their tasks without the right tools and resources. In fact, if you don’t give employees what they need to do their jobs, they’re going to become resentful quickly. Engagement will plummet, and turnover will soar.

Your employees need modern, up-to-date software and hardware to do their jobs, and they need access to resources that will make their jobs easier – everything from office supplies to company cars and phones. Do your best to remove obstacles that might get in the way of employees’ ability to move agilely when doing their jobs. No one wants to navigate a complicated bureaucracy with lots of red tape in order to get something done at work.

4) Offer Some Scheduling Flexibility

Besides giving plenty of mandatory time off, you need to offer employees some scheduling flexibility to help them maintain a healthy sense of work-life balance. In the post-COVID world, maybe it’s appropriate to move to a work-from-home model, or a hybrid model in which employees spend some days at the office and some days at home.

Whether employees are working from the office or from home, give employees the option to flex their schedules so they can attend to family responsibilities, run important errands that can only take place during the day, care for their health, and so on.

5) Give Each Employee Individual Attention

Each of your employees needs individual attention from management to feel seen and heard. That means taking the time to check in with employees regularly – once a week or so, check in to see how their work is going, whether they need anything, and whether they have any complaints. You should also put the work into getting to know your employees as people. Take them out to lunch once in a while. Grab happy hour drinks together on a Friday. Ask about their families and pets. Employees will feel more loyal and committed when they feel like they have personal connections at work.

Are you looking for ways to make your company thrive? You need to encourage more employee engagement. You’ll be surprised at how much better everyone can do when they’re committed to doing the best job possible.

How to keep your employees happy

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Keep your employees happy|How to keep your employees happyThere’s no doubt that happy employees make a business better. Recent research shows that employees who are satisfied with their job are more motivated, work harder, and build stronger bonds with their employers if they feel they are being well taken care of at work. With that in mind, here are some easy and effective ways to keep employees happy by improving their morale and driving performance.

Communicate your expectations

It is important to communicate your expectations to your employees. If you expect them to be at work by 9am, you need to make this clear. Employees are more likely to keep their commitments if they know exactly what’s expected of them.

You will need to find out what your employees want and need. Try to find out what motivates them and give it to them. You can ask your employees about their ideal work hours, the flexibility that they desire from their job, and how many hours they would like to work each day. Be clear with rules and policies while being considerate of your employees.

Organize social outings

Team building is important. Employees feel more satisfied when they have a strong bond with their teammates and co-workers. Organize regular events that allow employees to interact outside of the office, such as team lunches or group outings. This will boost camaraderie and strengthen ties between employees, which can translate to better productivity in the office.

Recognize good work

Rewarding employees for their good work will motivate them to keep up the good work. After all, employee recognition is absolutely integral in building a happy and healthy workplace environment. This can take various forms such as a lunch with your boss or a monetary bonus.

You may also consider organizing contests that keep employees engaged in their work.

Offer benefits

Offering benefits that your employees want, such as flexible work hours or a company car for a new mom who needs to drive to work, will go a long way in keeping them happy.

Offer perks such as extended holiday leave, more flexible work hours, and maternity/paternity leave. These are things that employees want and will help to boost morale while making your business more competitive too.

Trust your staff

It’s important to realize that as an employer, you need to trust your employees. If you have stated a commitment to creating work hours between 9am and 5pm, don’t contact them outside of those hours unless there is a very good reason for the intrusion. Employees who feel like their employers mistrust them will lose motivation to put in their best effort at work.

Give them the right tools

Employees need to feel like they have everything they need to do their jobs well. Giving employees access to state-of-the-art equipment and ensuring that software is updated regularly will reduce frustrations that can impact performance negatively.

To keep your employees happy, you need to communicate your expectations to them, offer benefits and perks that they value, trust them, and give them the tools they need to do their job well. If you follow this simple formula for keeping your employees engaged, satisfied, loyal, and productive; chances are that your company will enjoy strong growth in the future.

Why Your Employees Count as Much as Your Clients

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Success in business begins with your people. The model is actually quite simplistic although not always easy to execute. What effective managers and leaders must recognize is that it begins with caring about the people who drive your business. But what distinguishes success is the recognition that businesses are driven not just by customers but by employees as well. Developing a culture of caring within your organization to engage your employees is vital to the strategy to drive success to your business.

Building a Customer Focused Environment

As customer expectations are constantly changing, it is ever more critical that businesses are in tune with those trends. It seems that every day expectations are rising rapidly with every transaction and interaction. In order to leverage the power of customer care in your business, it must be integrated into all aspects of your business by recognising your internal and external customers. Superior customer care can become a powerful business driver that is not centered on major investments but simply an awareness of how you do business. Ultimately, the more that you increase engagement with your customers and focus on taking a routine interaction and making it something memorable, the better chance you will have of creating an improved customer experience. But the process must begin with your employees, also known as your internal customers.

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About the Author

Julie Bowen is a freelance writer and full-time mom. After graduating college, she put a lot of effort into her career as a businesswoman with several successful enterprises, but when motherhood came along, she decided it was time to pull back and take up her other passion, writing. Now she writes about business and finance and finds her work-life balance far more enjoyable. When not working and caring for her children, she likes to go for long walks with her dogs, though she is considering using Rollerblades so they can pull her.