When it comes to productivity, there are a thousand ways that claim to raise it, but not all of them work out and there’s not an exact recipe for success. Every company is different and has diverse needs, but we know one thing for sure: Employee Engagement is an HR must nowadays and will definitely boost positive results.
It’s no secret that happy employees are high performers and loyal employees, but achieving a high level of employee engagement is not as easy as we’d want it to be, although it pays off. We live in a world where companies search and compete to obtain and retain the best talent out there, and employees often pick an employer that offers a better set of benefits, and those benefits no longer apply to specifically monetary ones.
Managers tend to think that employee engagement is linked to a higher paycheck, but that’s not entirely true. Sure, a good salary is definitely an important factor and it may assure you a high performer, but the reality is that performance and engagement are not linked, you can have an employee doing outstanding work but they may be unhappy or unfulfilled. Luckily this is an area that now has quite a bit of study behind it. New techniques like hybrid voting and other engagement strategies are showing their merit and becoming important tools in any manager's repertoire.
According to Gallup, only one-third of US employees feel actually engaged at work, and research shows that engaged employees report higher levels of productivity; so it’s definitely something worth investing in and that will pay off in so many different ways.
We’ve covered in the past that it is important to pay attention to what your employees need, in our article “Sustaining Employee Engagement Best Practices” we explained the importance of Employee Engagement HR Best Practices and what some of them are, but we understand that sometimes it is hard to get started.
Using a tool or software to track employees’ productivity and performance will give you a great insight into what your employees are in need of the most. As your company grows, it gets harder to keep track of everybody’s tasks, accomplishments, and blockers. Eventually, you expect everyone to be able to thrive by themselves and just trust that your managers are on top of their teams and their progress. But, what if someone feels a bit lost? Or if their managing style is not what their teams need? What if someone is not seeing clearly what’s missing or what is needed to improve their team’s productivity?
It’s always best to tie your managers’ approach towards their teams and the focus regarding employee engagement with a great Employee Engagement HR tool.
Take advantage of the digital era, we are now connected to everyone and to everything and we can monitor whatever we want in the palm of our hands. Use technology to measure and improve employee productivity. If you set up your organization to use an employee engagement HR software, you’ll be able to verify how every team is doing and set them up for success.
When using software like Hirebook, you can monitor your team’s progress by setting up KPIs and OKRs that you can adjust to your company’s needs. Setting OKRs for your employees is a great way to keep them focused on what has to be done and they can work their schedule and activities towards accomplishing their objectives.
This will not only help your employees streamline their activities but will also help them see how much they’re able to accomplish in a certain amount of time. You will also see how activities and tasks are assigned to them and the success on each and every one of them.
Letting your team fly free with a clear set of objectives and tasks will make them feel like you trust them and that they don’t need no one "surveilling" over them to verify the work is being done. Especially now where millennials are taking over the workforce, a sense of accountability can really help with employee engagement and boost positive results.
It always seems to get down to communicating, but we can’t address this enough. We know sometimes we don’t have the time to actually sit and share a cup of coffee with our employees, or listen to them when they ask for our attention at a certain time… Sometimes we’re just too invested in a project, a special visit, an issue that needs to be fixed, etc.
There are always reasons not to communicate and bond with our teams, but it’s important to set aside some time to dedicate to their concerns and to check if everything’s ok with them. Maybe your intention is to do so, but also, our schedules and calendars sometimes get too busy and when we realize which day it is, it’s been months since our last one-on-one meeting.
An Employee Engagement HR tool can help you set aside this important space to share with your subordinates. Hirebook’s One-on-Ones can be scheduled as frequently as you’d like, either weekly, biweekly or monthly, and you can add an agenda in advance to review important items that need to be addressed at every meeting. You could also benefit from recording your meetings so you can review what you discussed, doing so will help you follow up with what your team learns in every meeting. A One-on-One meeting should be a safe space where you can listen to your employees’ concerns and review how they’re doing in their tasks, if they are headed in the right direction, if there are certain skills they’d like to develop or improve, etc. This meeting is not exactly an employee review, but rather a time where you can just see how they’re doing and if there’s something they need to do their jobs in a more efficient way.
Even when One-on-Ones cannot be as often as we’d like, it’s important to Check-In with your employees. Hirebook’s Check-In feature allows you to see how your employees are doing on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis, even between One-on-Ones. You can customize the questions you want to ask and get a deeper understanding of what’s going on, besides the typical “How are you feeling?”.
The key is in the questions, even if you just want to see how they’re feeling, go beyond and ask if there’s something you could do to help them or ask about a certain project they’re working on. Asking the right questions will provide you with the right insights.
Millennials are conforming most of today’s workforce, and if there’s something they are teaching us, is that workers are so much more than that, and that a happy employee is a productive one. So, why not care for your employees? They are the ones driving your company towards success, it’s extremely important to focus on our employees’ wellbeing because this provides employee engagement in return. Even when we seem to be busier and busier every day, having an HR tool to help you boost employee engagement and productivity seems like a good idea to help you streamline your activities and care for your company.