Your employees are vital assets for your company’s growth. Their skills and capabilities translate into the organization’s overall capabilities. Hence, letting them grow allows your company to grow further. However, employers have grappled with increasing employee productivity. At the very least, you need to cultivate a constructive relationship by encouraging employee engagement. Improving employee engagement is an excellent exercise – and investment – that enables a positive work culture.
If you oversee Human Resources (HR) and employee welfare, you may need to give more effort to building employee engagement. First, what is ‘employee engagement? It’s an HR concept that describes the level of enthusiasm and dedication a worker feels toward their job. It is the strength of the mental and emotional connection they feel toward the work they do, their teams, and their organization.
HR practitioners and theorists suggest that employee engagement can be measured at different levels. The higher your employees’ engagement levels are, the more likely they are to perform beyond the paycheck. They would invest themselves more in their jobs and offer their best to get work done. They may link their well-being to their performance. In turn, this is instrumental to your company’s success.
Needless to say, productivity directly affects the company in specific areas, including innovation, efficiency, customer engagement, and business costs. However, the mentioned areas are not the only ways employee engagement impacts your business positively. Here are more reasons you need to increase your employee engagement.
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Promotes employee retention
A solid connection to your company’s core values and goals will lead the employee to want to stay long-term at a company. Employees with a strong emotional connection to the company and their workmates will likely be actively engaged in their job.
To grow a strong emotional connection, a good business owner will support a learning culture in the business. Moreover, businesses with a learning culture have 30-50% higher retention rates than those without.
High retention means that your company will be less likely to lose employees. You will save hours spent on training and integrating a new employee to replace your valuable employee.
On top of that, your best advocates are your most engaged employees. Their reach in the workplace and outside the workplace should never be underestimated. They are able to connect with their peers and provide support in ways that superiors have difficulties in. Their positive reviews and comments outside the workplace could shape how the community perceives your company. These genuine comments may also attract the right talent to join your company.
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Increases workplace productivity
Since engaging employees are often the best performers and go beyond their job description, it increases workplace productivity. An engaged employee responds to a task faster and is more enthusiastic about communicating with stakeholders through meetings and client-facing presentations.
Employee engagement will lead the company to enable more agile workforces that are improving processes that benefit productivity.
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Drives innovation
Employees with strong connections to the company are often good at communication among themselves. They gain an understanding of everyone’s performance and how it contributes to the company. As a result, they will gain more proper coordination to develop better products and make better business decisions.
A team often produces more innovative products with varying skill sets that work together to come up with solutions to new challenges. It is not unheard of that this could lead to the development of breakthrough strategies and approaches.
Employee engagement will lead the team to have clear expectations on how each individual contributes to company success with a collaborative approach instead of self-achieving tendencies.
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Improves customer experience and satisfaction
Engaged employees who are happy with their work often pass their enthusiasm to others. This energy is often visible in their engagement with their stakeholders. Because they don’t see their work merely as a job, they have the subconscious drive to ensure stakeholders also succeed. The consistency between intention, emotions, and action can be seen in customer servicing, problem-solving, and troubleshooting.
The motivation here doesn’t just mean knowing how The Impact of Employee Engagement on Your Business to do the work. It also means knowing why the procedures are as such. Their ability to see beyond tasks and paychecks means that they are able to empathize with their customers. While not all problems may be solved through empathy alone, it paves way for customer satisfaction. Your customers would feel heard and able to vent their frustrations to an empathic ear. They’re more likely to leave the interaction feeling appreciated. If the problem was resolved, the customer would feel even better.
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Contributes to greater profitability
When you think about the saved cost from better employee retention, the increase in productivity, and better business decisions, your company is likely to gain a more significant profit. There’s no doubt that you may invest some money to get the right tools and system to support your engaging employee. However, the cost you pay will help your company create a better future culture for your business.
Having an engaged workforce will lead your company to gain better improvement. To increase employee engagement, a good company will find ways to make employees feel valued and supported instead of only focusing on how to increase productivity. This way, your employees will be more willing to grow their feelings about the company.