Succeed with these employee satisfaction drivers.
It’s clear committed personnel are a crucial operational component — 71 percent of senior executives rank employee engagement as very important in regard to achieving overall company success.
Measuring whether or not your attempts to engage workers are as successful as they could be, however, can be somewhat more complicated.
In many cases, efforts fall short. Just 24 percent of organizations consider their employees to be highly engaged, according to Harvard Business Review’s report.
Don’t let your organization get trapped between good employee engagement intentions and a retention program that ultimately falls short — and potentially damages profitability.
From aligning goals at all levels of the organization to building a program with clear, measureable results, these tips can help you keep employee satisfaction levels high:
- Make sure employees feel like an integral part of the organization: The Harvard Business Review report suggests frequently sharing strategy and business objectives with staff members at different levels, using a variety of communication methods. In addition to improving employee engagement, research has shown that efforts to share information can yield significant financial returns. Companies that were identified as highly effective communicators saw nearly half — 47 percent — higher total shareholder returns than companies that communicated less effectively, according to a 2010 report.
- Reinforce your recognition resources: Most organizations feel their workforce believes the company’s employee recognition programs have a positive effect on employee engagement — and help boost employee satisfaction and motivation, according to research from nonprofit human resource association WorldatWork. (For ideas on enhancing yours, read our recent blog post on creating the ideal employee recognition program.)
- Get input and analysis about how things are working: Employee engagement isn’t impossible to measure and track; it just takes time and persistence. The first step involves finding out what factors motivate employees.
Distribute regular enterprise-wide surveys to measure current employee satisfaction levels and find out what workers are looking for in an ideal position. Create internal teams to assess how processes and programs could change to better benefit employees. Gauge the effect of various education, incentive and other employee engagement efforts through periodic surveys and a comparison to corresponding employee departures during the program’s time period — which can indicate growing employee satisfaction issues. Culling and analyzing employee engagement driver-related data should be an ongoing effort.
If you’re looking for additional inspiration, our recent posts on involving employees in organizations with multiple, spread-out locations; eliminating employee perks without slashing employee satisfaction levels and ways you can provide more work-life balance by offering the right amount of time off may help you fine-tune your current employee engagement efforts.