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Employees are your biggest investments in your business. Not the machines, not the supplies, your employees. It’s important that your employees are also as invested in your company’s growth as you are. For this purpose, you need to make sure they are motivated and comfortable with their job.
In this blog post, we’re going to discuss the best employee engagement strategies that you can use to keep your hardworking employees with you for the long term. These strategies have been proven to decrease turnover and increase retention. So let’s dive in!
1. Ensure Respect and Empathy
Respect and empathy are foundational employee engagement strategies that form the basis of a healthy workspace. If you give your employees their due respect, they’ll have a positive sentiment about the workplace and work. This pushes them to work with more diligence.
It’s also important that you recognize changes in attitude or mood among your employees and help them with whatever mental stress they have. Empathy and kindness are the things that make your workplace more than a workplace and make it feel like family.
2. Communicate and Involve Them in Decisions
Strong and transparent communication is incredibly important in achieving your business goals. Communicate each update, goal, or change in the tasks to employees with proper explanations so they feel connected to the workspace. Communication helps prevent missed deadlines and task delays as well.
Whenever you’re making a company decision that affects your employees, involve them in the decision as well. Of course, you’re the authority and you can’t follow what every employee says, but a simple “What do you think about it?” can go a long way in making them feel valued.
3. Set Clear Expectations
One of the most important employee engagement strategies is setting clear expectations. Now I know it sounds cliché and the phrase is thrown around quite a bit. But most founders still don’t get its meaning right.
Setting clear expectations not only means telling them what to do. It means telling each employee what exactly the company expects from them, what their mediocre performance looks like and what their outstanding performance looks like, and how their work is going to help the company and their coworkers.
4. Ensure Fair Compensation and Incentives
Financial security is the main reason why your employees are working for you in the first place. So it’s crucial to make sure they get fairly compensated and feel valued. Treat employees as investments rather than expenditures.
While paying your employees, make sure they have proof of income, clarity on employee and tax deductions, and compliance when it comes to law. An automatic paystub generator like Paystubscity’s pay stub generator helps you calculate all of it easily and accurately. You can generate customizable pay stubs that are so clear and accurate, no one can dispute it.
An incentive is any kind of bonus that you offer your employees for their outstanding performance. They are a very powerful motivating factor as they can increase the productivity of your employees up to 44%. So develop an incentive program and give rewards for good performance.
5. Meet Their Needs
Another important factor is making sure employees have everything they need to do their work with peace of mind. This doesn’t just involve giving them a task and a deadline but also ensuring that they are physically and mentally ready for the job.
If an employee isn’t comfortable with a particular place or a neighboring coworker, you should help them with it. Paying attention to these small things is what differentiates good management from a great one.
6. Give Them Autonomy
Micromanaging is one of the easiest ways to kill an employee’s potential. Teaching and mentoring are important but they should be done separately, not when an employee is already working. You should assign the tasks strategically, meaning that you assign people what they do best.
Nobody knows better than the employees themselves what works best for them. So they should be able to decide how they want to work and have a certain power or decision-making related to their work.
7. Give and Collect Feedback
Feedback is the key to improvement in any system, especially in the workplace. It should go both ways. Continuously provide constructive feedback to your employees on their work and collect feedback from your employees about how they feel about working with you.
One approach is ‘stay interviews’, where you basically survey your employees about how satisfied they are with their jobs. This can be really insightful and can help you uncover key bottlenecks thwarting employee productivity that you can solve.
Stay interviews are reported to reduce employee turnover by 20%.
8. Recognize and Appreciate
Some employees go above and beyond to get noticed. Make sure you notice them and openly appreciate them for their good work. Criticize in private but praise in front of others. Employee recognition and appreciation is one of the most crucial employee management strategies.
It’s also a form of feedback. When one employee is praised for their efforts, other employees strive to get employer’s or manager’s approval as well. So make it a principle of your leadership.
9. Professional Growth and Internal Mobility
Another thing that turns employees off is the feeling of being stuck at the same job and the same pay rate for years with no growth. So one of the best ways to keep your best with you is to invest in their growth and skills. Provide your employees with growth opportunities and teach them higher level skills so they feel they are improving.
Another important strategy is “promoting from within”. Instead of hiring higher level employees separately, promote your existing stellar employees to higher positions after teaching them the required skills. Internal mobility is one of the most powerful employee engagement strategies because it aligns employees’ growth with compay growth.
10. Arrange Mentorship Programs
Take out time to arrange mentorship programs. Your employees don’t always know everything. And expecting them to learn on their own is a recipe for failure. As we said, employees are your investments, it’s best to equip them for skills that’ll ultimately be helpful for your own business.
Other than tangible skills, teaching soft skills is also crucial. One example is resilience training. Train your employees how to solve problems, how to work under pressure, and how to collaborate. These trainings make your employees more connected with your company and give them confidence.
Conclusion
The key to employee engagement and retention is making sure they feel connected, empowered and valued in the workspace. Proper feedback, recognition, fair salary, and growth opportunities lead to increased overall satisfaction and better performance.
Clarity on pay, taxes, and other deductions is an important part of employee satisfaction. Paystubscity’s online pay stub generator helps you get that done easily and effortlessly with accurate tax calculations and your own branding.
