As an employer in any type of industry or an HR manager for that matter of an organization, you have the responsibility to make sure that your employees are in tip-top shape or show excelling performance in what they do in the office on a daily basis. From doing the work assigned to them with utmost ease to how passionate and engaged they truly are in the workplace should fall just right about your corner as a manager or the owner of the respective establishment.
A good manager working in the HR field is in charge of constructing an environment wherein productivity is at its peak, motivation exceeds the unexpected and of course in charge of keeping the interests or goals of their employees on the same plane. Encouraging passion and bringing out the brighter side of positivity is just one of those things that they are tasked with. It is a huge challenge for an HR to fully monitor these tasks entirely the whole year, but If you would think about it from a different perspective or see the brighter side of things then it is actually a very great arsenal to incorporate to any organization. You just need to remember and put into mind what are the resulting benefits and the advantages that these simple things tend to create and start in the working environment.
The stereotypical thinking in the business industry is that as long as their employees are doing the jobs assigned to them and there is some kind of progress being made from their side then happiness, passion and being engaged in their work is not a problem at all. It’s their choice of work and responsibility to do it, it matters not if their happy or not as long as they are able to perform and show some kind of results in the tasks assigned to them at the end of the day.
Well, in hindsight that may be true in some sense but that’s not the actual case and the full story behind this stereotypical scenario. There might a little bit of progress that’s being achieved on the latter side of things when you disregard the full engagement and emotion of the employee but compared to employees who are truly passionate and happy with their work that’s somehow a turning point and a twist in that type of story.
People overly underestimate and belittle what are the core benefits of having employees that are more engaged in their designated work or field. Several global studies have already shown and were able to prove that an employee who is more engaged in the work that they do produce several advantages and to the organization that they are working for. Higher employee satisfaction, better retention rates, exceeding productivity in the office to superior profitability with a dash of trust and loyalty to match are things to be expected from a person who is truly engaged with their work.
With all of those things in mind, several questions might emerge and entail you on how you can actually implement and strategize ways to make employee engagement bloom in your own organizations.
Communication Tactics
Communication is the main factor when it comes to company engagement. You need to ensure that your employees are communicating well and what was said is truly understood by both parties. Communication is a bridge that connects your workers together, you need to double-check if both sides are getting what was meant to be intended to mitigate some forms of misunderstanding and conflicts from occurring. Miscommunication is very common in the workplace that some people become more disengaged in their work and just causes an array of problems to happen when not properly addressed. They might think that they are doing the right thing as understood but in reality, that’s not what the sender or the department really wanted or had in mind.
Always remember that communication is a two-way process, there should always be time for listening and a time for talking to clarify and understand what they are actually talking about. To promote having employee engagement in the office, you need your employees to relay what is on their mind, accept constructive criticisms and get some feedback on ideas and opinions that are being presented. A session where there is an exchange of thoughts and ideas will not only promote communication, it will promote engagement and interaction as well. Talk about hitting two birds with one stone on that one.
It will make employees feel like they truly are a part of something and their suggestions actually matter. This will push them and entail your employees to see more than meets the eye and promote better engagement with one another. At the end of the day, you will be surprised what they are able to come up with and how successful the end product will be when employees are given the opportunity to communicate freely with each other.
“Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act. “- James Thurber
Ideal Workplace Environment
The type or kind of environment the workplace portrays influences the people that work there. Environment plays an important factor when it comes to productivity, being more engaged, and a big reflection on what values the company you are working for has. If you would want people to be more engaged and passionate about the work that they do, you need to create an ideal environment where your employees can thrive and agree on.
A good company culture that promotes positivity and being happy in the workplace increases better performance. Likewise, if there is some kind of negativity or bad culture lingering around, it will also affect the team’s productivity level, making their energy more focused on hate rather than the job that they have. It will further promote an employee to be more disengaged instead because they don’t feel the harmony.
Remember that most of the time your team will be surrounded by this type of environment, from the time they enter the office to the time that they leave. You need to put into some consideration on what feel it has and the impact it gives out. You need to have an environment that will make working in an office more exhilarating. Not just by the physical ambiance it portrays but the emotional and social level it gives out.
“The best innovation comes from inclusive work environments that foster diverse ideas, nurture people with diverse talent and backgrounds, and create strong relationships with diverse communities.” – Mark Parker
Encourage Collaboration and Teamwork
There will be connections and certain bonds that will be established and developed inside of the work environment. Teamwork and having some kind of collaboration between the team members will always be inevitable, so you need to maximize what these people can do with each other. Promoting teamwork and collaboration in the right way helps employees have better engagement and interaction with one another.
You just need to make sure that your employees that are working together don’t clash in terms of personality, ideas, and point of interests. A gallop study was able to find out that having a friendly companion to work within the office increases the satisfaction of the employee by around 50%, affecting how they engage and tackle the workload assigned to them and how happy they truly are in the workplace.
As a manager, you need to know how to sort people into teams in which will highlight, compliment and truly showcase what the capabilities of their employees truly have to offer. Employees work better with people they are friends with compared to people who are strangers and people who have bad relationships with them. Sometimes if the members just do not have chemistry and a connection with one another it is just a concoction to what you call a disaster.
“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” – Andrew Carnegie
