In the recent decade, the concept of employees engagement and its rising significance in the workplace has exploded.
Moreover, organizations are recognizing that measuring and addressing it is no longer optional. However it has become critical in today’s workplace.
Particularly when one considers some critical statistics from Gallup, it indicates that companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their competitors by 147 percent in terms of earnings per share.
As 87 percent of employees worldwide are disengaged at work, it seems rather evident that the untapped frontier of workplace performance management may be employee engagement.
However, whether owing to a lack of depth of information about how engagement should be generated or possibly a lack of awareness about what the modern employee wants, many organizations continue to do things incorrectly in their quest to increase employee engagement.
The following are the five things that numerous organizations get wrong about employee engagement.
1- During the survey, focusing on participation rates
It’s reasonable for a company to be concerned about its participation rates at the start of its engagement journey, because you need some data to begin with. also part of the maturing process in raising awareness of how vital engagement is to an organization.
However, assuming your company has been conducting engagement surveys and developing action plans for areas that need to be improved for a few years, it’s time to let go of that 100% participation mark.
If your employees are uninterested in taking the survey, then it is all the information you need to know about their level of engagement.
It is not necessary to survey to validate this. Moreover, making it essentially compulsory for employees may further reduce their engagement.
2- Targeting Only a Score
Despite being the cardinal sin of employee engagement, it is the one that is most often committed.
All firms require some empirical measure to hold their stakeholders accountable. There’s nothing wrong with having a good score.
Scoring well is not a bad thing, so long as you want to do it. Making engagement all about the score is a grave error for an organization.
Efforts to engage the staff cannot be thought of like training to boost survey results. Why? It leads to doing stuff like this:
- Concentrating short-term action items that are unsustainable and have no long-term impact on an employee’s engagement.
- Concentrating efforts on engagement-related action plans only during the lead-up to the survey’s launch and then winding down immediately afterward. Create a culture of apathy toward engagement for the remainder of the year, both among managers and their reports, when no survey is imminent.
3- Taking Employee Engagement as a Separate Agenda
Engagement’s promised land is not to achieve a desirable score following a survey. Many organizations and managers would have you believe that, but it is not the case.
Rather than that, it is to establish a sustainable work environment that engages employees without ever using the word ‘engagement.’ Many organizations view employee engagement as a distinct agenda from everything else going on.
However, at its core, employee engagement is about having empowered employees, employees who feel included in efforts to achieve the team’s goals, employees who feel cared for, recognize that they are being developed appropriately, and know that they are doing their best work every day.
These are not issues that require their agenda. These are issues that can be discussed during management team meetings, operations meetings, and leadership forums.
Employee engagement does not have to be marketed.’
Attempt to create an environment that fosters the example of an engaged employee without ever using the word ‘engagement.’
If your employees truly believe they are empowered, cared for, and motivated toward success, it makes no difference if you do not hold a single ‘Team Engagement Meeting’ throughout the year; they will remain engaged.
All organizations should strive to avoid treating it as a separate agenda.
Read More: How Employee Recognition Platform Motivates Your Workplace?
4- Having the Completely Wrong Idea About Motivation
What does it mean to be motivated? As a general rule, we believe that a motivated person is a happy person. It is not always the case.
Employers – and team leaders – have searched for strategies for team motivation many times in an attempt to keep their personnel pleased. And, of course, they were unsuccessful in their mission.
The reason for this is because, while most people – employers and employees alike – strive for a joyful and easygoing work atmosphere, motivation and happiness are not synonymous.
Happy coworkers will be more productive and engaged, but will happiness make them more productive and engaged? Occasionally, the answer is no.
Therefore, strive to motivate your employees and keep them alert, proactive, and involved, rather than simply happy.
And, of course, you should always examine your teams’ performance to discover whether or not this holds for your organization.
5- Lack of Understanding for the Idea of Collaboration
Nobody can disagree that forming teams and collaborating with others is beneficial. It can enhance staff morale, assist employees in identifying and resolving problems more quickly, and so forth.
However, some people despise collaboration and prefer to work alone. Other people prefer offline communication to internet communication technologies, regardless of their use.
Ensure that you are more resilient in the way your staff handles their work. They are individuals, for better or worse, and each functions and behaves differently. Allow them to adapt the rules to fit their needs, not vice versa.
If someone is a lone wolf who prefers to ask direct questions, it is advisable to ignore them.
At the end of the day, it is the employer’s implied trust in the manner each employee chooses to perform their job that makes all the difference.
The Takeaway
Employees engagement is a vital factor in the success of any organization.
However, most organizations get it wrong when it comes to implementing the employee engagement concept.
Organizations must begin to mature their approach to the concept of employee engagement. If it is no longer a novel notion and personnel in your organization are becoming more aware and savvy about it, it is time to handle it differently as well.
