3 Ways Small Businesses Can Improve Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has an impact on everything from productivity to employee retention to morale. A variety of studies have found that highly engaged workplaces have 20% or higher productivity and profits per employee than those that don’t. Let’s look at three ways companies can improve their employee engagement.

1. Get Honest Feedback and Then Act on It

Companies must first determine the level of employee engagement instead of acting based on impressions and anecdotes. Data driven management decisions are not impossible in Human Resources, but they may not be possible if the people collecting the data are biased in how they collect the data or interpret it.

The solution is to outsource employee engagement surveys to third parties such as Insightlink (for more information about Insightlink and their services, click here) so that management doesn’t receive overly rosy reports or biased action plans. This can happen because employees are afraid to tell HR about problems out of fear it will get back to their managers, data collection may ignore high non-response rates in favor of the skewed positive image or use feedback as justification for its pre-existing desired actions instead of what employees want. When a third party runs anonymous surveys, you’ll get more honest information than if HR could come back to “talk” to submitters and more detailed, actionable advice.

2. Encourage Transparency

There are several ways businesses can encourage transparency. One is having clear procedures for decisions like promotions, raises, hiring, firing and other actions that impact employees instead of having unclear standards that make it seem like individual biases can come into play.

Another step companies can take is to have a no gossip policy. Not only does this improve productivity, it takes away power from people who enjoy using gossip to create informal authority in the workplace for themselves or even use it as a weapon against others.

Encourage formal documentation of complaints by employees whether via email or written forms so that he-said-she-said situations don’t become even more emotionally laden and warped when decisions are made.

3. Develop People When They Aren’t a Fit – Where Possible

Human Resources does make mistakes at times, such as when someone is hired for their credentials and not the skills necessary for the job, or when someone is promoted above their abilities. These people are certain to become disengaged when they feel like they are a poor fit. The solution is to honestly assess employees regularly, instead of holding annual performance reviews. And then offer training so that they become the qualified personnel you want them to be.

By investing in people with training where they fall short, your company demonstrates that it values people and recognizes shortcomings in management decisions. By determining which cases are caused by personality or values that mismatch the job requirements, you help those who would otherwise feel disengaged and pull down others. And by identifying those who are permanently disengaged by having discussions like these, you know who you should actually get rid of.