30 Mar 2022

The Vital Importance of Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement is such an important area to get right. And, if you do, the impact on employee wellbeing and overall performance will be enormously positive.

Using the feedback and data you get from employees will not only make for more productive, motivated individuals and teams but also really allow an organisation to learn about itself and continuously improve.

Here are some of our key tips and ideas to ensure that employee engagement is a key focus for your organisation.

Organisations Need to Constantly Engage with Employees

Sending a staff survey once or twice a year will only get you the thoughts and feelings of employees on those two days of the year. Engagement should be daily. Constantly asking how everyone is and allowing employees to feedback when things aren’t right is the only way for everyone to feel engaged.

This may seem like a massive ask. But not if you have the right tools at your disposal. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your people and how to develop a happy and high-performing environment when you give employees the means to consistently and constructively share their thoughts and feelings.

For instance, the Tribe365 app gives employees at all levels the ability to anonymously tell their organisation how they are feeling at work so that the organisation can create a happy and high performing workplace.

Learn more about the Tribe365 app and how it’s helping organisations increase productivity, happiness and profitability

Listen and Act

Engagement will only work if people see results or at least feel like they are being listened to.

Real engagement means creating a culture where every voice is heard and employees at every level feel that what they have to say is not just heard but actually making a tangible difference.

A Shared Vision and Journey

It is easy for people to start to feel left out or disengaged from an organisation. It’s vital to have a shared vision or journey that everyone understands and really invests in.

Whether you manage a team of 10 or are the CEO of a company employing 1000 people, a shared vision will create a united team that works together towards common goals, which in turn gives employees a real sense of purpose and pride in what they are contributing to.

Celebrate Good Times, Come On

Meaningful praise and celebrating successes – whether big or small – is a big part of driving excellent engagement in the workplace.

When an individual or team has done well, be sure to celebrate that achievement. One of the biggest reasons people leave an organisation is because they feel undervalued. Simple gestures like saying thank you and giving employees kudos is a great way to make people feel valued, positive, engaged and happy in their work.

Check out the video below to see organisational behaviour expert Dan Webber explaining how the Tribe365 enables employees at all levels to easily award their colleagues kudos for great work, thereby creating a highly engaged, supported and positive culture that breeds success.

Be Honest with Yourselves

Honesty should be at the forefront of all engagement. If you want to know what’s standing in the way of your employees and teams consistently delivering great performance, then promoting honesty is the only way to achieve this.

Staff often feel reluctant to share their true thoughts and feelings, as they fear reprisals from managers or colleagues or simply they think they won’t be taken seriously.

Use your organisation’s most powerful data source – your people – to truly learn about pain points and areas of real concern for employees at all levels. If an organisation isn’t willing to learn hard truths about itself, then it will stagnate.

The Tribe365 app is one way to enable staff to anonymously share their honest thoughts and feelings with their organisation. But it’s also important to develop a culture (which Tribe will allow you to do) where people feel confident enough to openly and honestly share their views in a constructive manner without any fear of repercussions.

Great Ways to Increase Employee Engagement

Daily Sentiment Check Asking everyone how their day has gone everyday. Start to see what is influencing good and bad days across the organisation. You’ll start to see patterns and have visibility of what needs to be fixed

Kudos Give teams the means to celebrate their colleagues’ successes and positive behaviours aligned with the organisation’s values and vision. The Tribe365 app’s Kudos function allows them to do just that at the click of a button!

Offloads People need to offload. And by ‘offload’, we mean sharing their thoughts and feelings in a very raw way. Get things off their chest. And this applies as much to work as it does to their personal lives. So, give them a psychological ‘safe space’ that allows them to share exactly what they feel and think. The Tribe365 app has an Offload function that allows employees to literally just offload what they feel in a very open, honest but ultimately anonymous and safe way. Please encourage your people and teams to use it!

Some Final Points to Consider

Employee engagement is a two-way street, where trust and respect is earned. Don’t allow your employee engagement processes or approaches to be undermined by bad apples who don’t want to properly contribute to a high performing culture.

It’s only reasonable that employees should be expected to display good workplace behaviours like loyalty and respect if your organisation is shaping a culture conducive to happiness and high performance.

Also, in line with what we’ve said about ‘always listening to employees and allowing their voices to be heard, it might be worth thinking about developing a steering group inclusive of staff at all levels which would oversee the successful delivery of anything coming out of the findings of the engagement.

Start measuring employee engagement and getting things right with your culture!

Speak to Dan or Oliver about what Tribe can do to help you improve happiness and performance in your organisation today

+44 (0) 1325 734 847 Or team@tribe365.co