Employee engagement is a critically important factor to business success. While it’s something that can be partially dealt with in the realm of compensation management, methods of driving engagement can take many different forms. Not every solution will fit every business, but here are five ways to help keep your employees engaged.
- Benefits – This falls under compensation management and total rewards. If your benefits package is generous enough, employees will feel a certain sense of security. Knowing that their health insurance and retirement accounts are taken care of removes stressors from everyday life and allows them to focus more intently on the task at hand. Vacation time and PTO can also help by allowing worn out employees the opportunity to refresh themselves.
- Ownership – another compensation related method. If your organization is set up in such a way to allow this, adding stock options to your employees’ benefits package can be a powerful motivator and driver of engagement. Directly tying their personal success to the success of the organization at large makes them feel like they have skin in the game, and thus they’ll work harder to ensure the growth of the organization.
- Movement – stagnation is a major engagement killer. If your employees feel like they have no potential for movement, their engagement will begin to slip and it’ll show in terms of their performance. Recognizing excellence and rewarding it – whether by pay increase, promotion, or some other factor – is a powerful way to keep employees engaged. Their skills should be constantly being fostered as well, and they should constantly feel like their career is moving forward. This way, they’ll help keep your company moving forward, too.
- Variety – stagnation applies in more than one way. Though an employee’s tasks are determined by their position to a large extent, avoiding monotony is critical. Performing the same rote tasks day in and day out is not only exhausting, but also a good way to have valuable employees looking for other opportunities, regardless of whether or not they compensate as well. The more you can mix things up, the better.
- Personality – If your organization has the appearance of a sterile corporate monolith, it will be hard to encourage and engage employees. They’ll be left feeling that they’re nothing more than a cog in a vast, unknowable machine. A corporate culture built on collaboration, teamwork, fun, and personality will work wonders with engagement and help hold off the disillusionment that can be felt by many workers.
These five steps are just the beginning, though. Entire books can (and have) been written on the subject, and there’s no answer that’s always right for every situation. Still, if you need some ideas to drive employee engagement, these five vectors are a good place to start.