If you’ve been paying attention to recent trends, you’ve probably heard the phrase employee engagement more than once. In days gone by, this wasn’t really much of a concern, or even a though. You hired employees based on skills you needed, you paid them and they showed up every day to do the work. Done and done.
Today’s workforce isn’t like that. Things have changed. They’ve evolved and if you don’t evolve with them, you’re going to find it increasingly more difficult to keep your best talent. Employee Engagement is one powerful mechanism you can use to do that. Below, you’ll find a few helpful tips to start you down that path.
Recognize Your Employees In Something Close To Real Time
When employee recognition first burst onto the workplace scene, many business owners responded by setting up employee reward and recognition program which doled out awards to star performing employees on an annual basis, or perhaps quarterly.
That’s increasingly less effective these days. When an employee does something worthy of recognition, it’s much more impactful to recognize the achievement right away, in something as close to real time as can reasonably be accomplished.
The good news is that if you already have a recognition program in place, it’s easy enough to make that happen, and if you don’t, it’s a simple matter to build it along those lines right from the start.
Change The Way You Think About Your Company’s Culture
When you started your business, you wrote a mission statement. You defined your company’s core values. You led by example. From those things, your company’s culture was born. That’s how corporate culture always starts, but it’s important to remember that’s the beginning point, not the end point.
As your company grows, it changes. That’s just a natural part of the process, and as it changes, its culture should be allowed to change to, guided by your employees themselves.
This is a process you can manage, but you can’t actually control. A big part of your company’s culture is going to be determined by the ways in which your employees interact, value and recognize each other.
For the biggest and best impact, you should be encouraging certain interactions and discouraging others but you’ll just have to resign yourself to the fact that they’re going to happen. Your company will change before your eyes. Embrace that, and let your employees embrace it too, so you can create something amazing with them.
There’s certainly more to this topic, but if you put the tips above into practice, you’ll utterly transform your current recognition program and delight your employees. That’s good for them, and it’s great for you!