Businesses around the world look for a way to increase productive collaboration within their employees. This can be achieved through training, mentoring and coaching employees in a more effective manner. About 40% of employees are not engaged with their jobs. These disengaged employees are less likely to bring their A game to the table which can lead to lower productivity and profits for the company. In order to improve employee collaboration, businesses should create a culture of engagement where all employees feel valued, respected and trusted.
9 ways to boost employee engagement
A lot of business owners put a lot of effort into making sure that they and their employees are happy with their jobs. However, employee engagement can be difficult to measure. If you want to improve employee engagement in your company, consider the following tips:
- Train your team. Make sure your employees have the right skills for their jobs. Many companies hire people based on their experience and credentials, but those credentials aren’t always relevant to the actual duties that a new employee will be performing. Before hiring anyone, know exactly what will be expected of them in their new role. Create a training schedule that includes time for both on-the-job and classroom instruction.
- Set Clear goals for your team. There are many ways in which you can improve teamwork in your employees. If I was starting to set goals for a team, I would do these five things first.
- Ensure that everyone understands what they need to do
- Create an environment where everyone feels comfortable asking questions if they don’t understand something
- Make sure that everyone has the right information at their disposal
- Give out clear instructions and directions so that everyone knows what their role is and how their role fits into the team as a whole
- Be supportive in helping solve problems and issues among team members who may be having difficulty working as a team.
- Make sure your employees are enjoying their work. Although you may have hired someone with the right education and skills for the job, it’s not always a perfect match for his or her personality type or interests. It’s important to know what motivates every employee so you can ensure that he or she is doing work that he or she enjoys and is good at. Encourage your employees to take on challenges and learn new things by giving them opportunities to try new activities outside of their normal job description.
- Choose the right leaders. Good leaders inspire employee engagement in your business. Notably, Businesses are built on teams. And those teams depend on leaders to run them. That’s where employee management software is essential. It makes the life of managers easier and ensures that everyone knows their roles and responsibilities. But there are so many features to choose from, it can be difficult to find one that fits your vision for your team.
- Hire the right staff. It’s hard to stay engaged when you aren’t interested in what you’re doing or feel like you don’t have a say in what happens in your workplace. So hire people who want to be there, and find out why they want to work for you. If you can find someone passionate about your business goals, that’s a good sign of future engagement.
- Find the right fit for the job. If an employee isn’t happy where they are, they won’t be engaged at work. They need to have tasks that fit their interests and skills, and they need to feel like they have adequate support from management if they encounter problems along the way.
- Be a collaborative leader. What does it mean to be a collaborative leader? First, it means doing your best to get employees invested in the same mission. You want everyone on the team working together to achieve a common goal, rather than operating in silos or working at cross purposes. This can sound simple, but in practice, it’s harder than you might think.
- Encourage Collaboration. Trying to get your employees to collaborate is like trying to herd cats—if cats were independently minded and only did what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it. The fact is that people are all different, and they have different motivations and ideas of what success looks like. Some people are more motivated by money, while others don’t care about being rich as long as they’re happy with their work. Some people want recognition for their work, while others are content just doing the job well. Your employees need to see collaboration as a positive thing. They should be sharing ideas and working together to accomplish goals that benefit the entire department — not just coming up with ways to get around each other.
- Reward effort. Getting people who don’t see eye-to-eye on every issue and goal to work together toward a common goal is a challenge for any leader. However, using reward as motivation does the magic. One of the biggest challenges in getting employees to collaborate is that many people aren’t intrinsically motivated—they need a paycheck before they’ll really put in the effort at work.
- Stop Fault Finding. Fault finding is a common reason for collaboration to fail, but it can be solved. Many businesses avoid the issue by using performance management tools that focus on celebrating success and rewarding employees for their good work. It’s very important to recognize strengths and achievements of your employees and help them to improve in their key responsibilities, but if you find faults, it will create mistrust and make your staff feel as though you aren’t behind them. In order to solve this problem you can use the following strategies:
Conclusion
Using the right tools such as online employee management system helps you to improve employee engagement. As noted above, creating an open communication environment where no question is off limits and there are no bad questions. Moreover, building on strengths instead of focusing on weaknesses. Furthermore, getting rid of negative labels and encouraging problem solving vs. fault finding. Another way is rewarding collaboration instead of individual achievements, such as giving bonuses based on increased revenue or profit, as opposed to increasing headcount or number of hours worked. These ways help to improve employee engagement and boost overall productivity.
