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What does it take to keep employee engagement up?

There’s a difference between a satisfied employee and an engaged employee. A satisfied employee might show up at the office, do their nine to five, and leave, but might not be as productive as they should be. There might be days when you, as an employer, might see a highly fluctuating level of productivity from your employees. The reason why it happens is a lack of employee engagement. But what is employee engagement? What measures can you take to boost it? And is there a niche factor that dictates employee engagement? Fear not as we’ll find answers to these questions in our blog today. We’ll take a look at what constitutes employee engagement and how you can take measures to boost it to create a highly motivated and dedicated workforce.

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement has a number of definitions from major players across the globe. As per Forbes, it means the emotional connection an employee has to an organization and its goals while Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat, defines employee engagement as “the art of getting people to believe what you want them to believe.”

Regardless of the countless interpretations, employee engagement means maintaining your workforce emotionally and allowing them to use effort at their own discretion. It also means motivating them to take charge of a situation and look at the organization’s objective rather than the sub-task they’re performing.

A common misconception among working professionals (employers and employees), is that they often use employee satisfaction and employee engagement interchangeably. As mentioned previously, a satisfied employee might not be a motivated employee. Therefore, as an employer, your job is to understand the difference and maintain and boost the metrics pertaining to employee engagement.

The difference between employee satisfaction and employee engagement

Here’s what you need to know to get up to speed on the difference between employee satisfaction and employee engagement:

Employee engagement is the emotional investment of an employee towards the organization’s objectives whereas employee satisfaction pertains to the happy emotional state of an employee minus the commitment towards the organization’s goals.
A satisfied employee may or may not take initiative towards different tasks within an organization, whereas an engaged employee will go a step above their usual tasks to accomplish a bigger organizational goal.
Satisfied employees are more disconnected from the inner workings and happenings of an organization, whereas an engaged employee might know and even participate in every major project and its sub-tasks.

One crucial thing to note is that none of these differentiators mean that employee satisfaction should be set aside. In fact, these days, it is more difficult to retain an employee than to hire one, and that’s because of low employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is just as crucial as employee engagement.

How to maintain and even boost employee engagement

Only a mere 15% of the employees are actually engaged in their jobs. While this factoid only represents the state of employment in the United States, there’s been a global change in the way people look at jobs. Unfortunately, employers these days haven’t realized that employees have been seeing through the tactics an organization throws their way when they really wish to enjoy their work. Overburdened, underpaid, and nothing along the way of a genuine good time. That’s what employees have been suffering from.

For obvious reasons, this leads to a steep decline in employee engagement, resulting in poor performance. To avoid such a scenario and to promote a healthy workspace culture, here’s what you need to do as an employer:

Make sure your employees are heard

One of the most common mistakes that employers and team leaders do is gloss over the issues their team has. Doing so not only hurts the credibility and character of the employer but also demotivates the team from putting in the required effort for even the most menial tasks. If you’re an employer or a team leader, please understand that your organization constitutes your workforce above any product or service that you offer.

By simply taking some time off your schedule to talk to the employees, you will understand the underlying issues they might face. Issues pertaining to resource management, working conditions, and more might pop up. Now, you might not be able to rectify certain problems on the spot, but lending a hearing ear to your team will surely make them feel heard and understood. This builds trust and faith in the existing system that you’ve established. Hence, hearing from your team members is a crucial aspect of building employee engagement, as the more you hear about different problems, the more you connect with your workforce.

Encourage your workforce at the time of their need

One of the best ways to improve employee engagement at your organization is to simply encourage your workforce during tough times. Sometimes, your team may be the second best or miss the best-selling product award by a handful of downloads. Such moments breed tension, sorrow, and, if handled negatively, fear. The last thing a dedicated team member who has worked for you wants to hear is you doubling down on them for a mistake they might not be a part of.

Wins and losses are a part of life. The same is the deal with businesses across the globe. No single business can run a perfect year, let alone a decade. Such times demand a better approach towards employee management. What you need to do is stand with your team. If they perform well and you overachieve your performance metrics, dedicate the victory to your team. If there’s been a mishandling of resources and you’ve incurred a defeat or a loss, don’t blame your team for it. Instead, highlight the issues and the solutions to fix them while motivating your team to learn from the experience and do better next time.

Make your workforce feel valued

A lot of times, your workforce might be engaged in a crucial project. They might work overtime or even during the weekends to create and refine the deliverables. However, most managers live under the illusion that the way they take notice of such displays of hard work and dedication is enough. Well, that’s where they’re wrong. An employee doesn’t get paid to work during the weekends, the most an organization does is provide a couple of complimentary leaves. And that too if there’s a policy in place for such things. If you, as a manager, feel like showing some form of appreciation to your workforce, then don’t shy away from it. In fact, managers who underappreciate what their workforce does for them should appreciate them even more. A little string of good and genuine words goes a long way toward nurturing and boosting employee morale. So, the next time you see someone doing a good job, appreciate them. Make the compliment feel personalized.

Make sure your workforce’s nutrition is adequate

As strange as it might sound, nutrition has a lot to do with employee engagement and satisfaction. Not every employee has the liberty of bringing a healthy and tasty homemade lunch every day. Some may wait for the lunch break to begin so that they can walk out of the office campus and get something to eat. Now, this isn’t a bad practice by any means, after all, there’s a dedicated lunch break that every employee has to follow.

However, there are a few underlying issues that most employers and team leads often gloss over. If you can provide a healthy and delicious meal to your workforce at the workplace itself, your employees will not only love it but save the time spent on looking for alternative methods to feed themselves. Workspace dining has its set of challenges that may plague your team nurturing efforts, here’s how:

If your workspace has a fully functional canteen then chances are that the food aggregators might be doing the bare minimum towards diversifying the meal choices. Fast food items such as burgers, fries, and other high calorie and cholesterol foods are widely available in canteens. These options can compromise the health of your employees over time and can even be compromised without proper food inspections.
If your workspace doesn’t have a canteen, then building one will cost you crucial resources such as time and money without the guarantee of finding a food aggregator that provides healthy and quick food options.
Another issue that plagues employee morale and efficiency is the time spent looking up what and where to eat. Some sources suggest that an employee may spend about 30 minutes daily deciding what to eat. A significant portion of an employee’s time is spent looking for meal options outside the office campus. This compromises efficiency and eventually leads to a dip in motivation.

The best way to navigate and overcome these challenges is to install a system that provides your workforce with the healthiest and tastiest meals at the office premises in an instant.

With the lechef smart fridge, you can do just that. The lechef smart fridge houses a number of healthy meal options that an employee can take by scanning the QR code on the fridge. Each of these smart fridges can cater to 50 employees with healthy, tasty, and affordable meals.

You can also save up to 11 hours per employee monthly on breaks. As strange as it might sound, employee engagement will see a boost if you know how and what to feed your workforce when they’re hungry.

Conclusion

Workplace dynamics are a mix of good and bad events. As an employer, the well-being of your workforce rests on your shoulders, not just for health reasons but for keeping tabs on KPIs as well. A satisfied employee can get a job done, but an engaged employee can take initiative even when the job might not be directly related to their line of work. Such resources are crucial for an organization and should be valued just as equally as anything else. Employee engagement is a crucial aspect of your workforce and shouldn’t be glossed over under any circumstances. Because the more you understand the people that make your team, the more you connect with them and the better they perform.