Employee engagement can sometimes become a tricky thing within a business. If your team has been working on a long, intense project, morale can become low and work slows down. In turn, the employee becomes less engaged with their job, and with the company as a whole.
Employee engagement is defined as a staff member’s emotional investment in their role and the company they work for – whether they believe in the business’s mission and want the company to succeed, rather than just because it gives them a paycheck.
But how do you claw back an employee’s engagement and emotional investment after it’s diminished? Thankfully, there are a few ways.
A number of tech solutions and programs have been launched for this very purpose. Below, we’ll talk about a few of our favorites that we know to work well in engaging employees. With these guys’ help, your business will be back on track with an enthusiastic, engaged team in no time.
Encourage Interaction
Getting a branded app for your business’s internal processes is a great idea – kind of like a personal workplace social network. MeetApp is an amazing application for this – when it comes to event planning, MeetApp is the industry leader; but it also has been found to work excellently for making things fun and interactive in the everyday at work.
It has a chat feature where the team can swap information and ask questions; it has deadlines and schedules so that everyone knows what’s expected of them; and it keeps everyone organized with a calendar and notifications for updates.
Essentially, keeping your staff in the loop with what’s going on throughout the business is a great way to ensure they are invested in and knowledgeable about everything that’s going on, and therefore care about the outcomes. The best part is that MeetApp can be entirely customized to your brand – like your very own, bespoke app.
Utilize Mobile/Online Learning
Setting aside time for your team to learn new skills and develop existing ones is a core essential for happy employees. Feeling like you are growing in your role is a huge motivation for doing your best in your job and loving your role.
Business owners don’t have to round up the troops and take a day out to attend a boring training day or conference – you can simply sign everyone up for a digital learning scheme and dedicate a few hours per week to it.
Research courses for your team that are relevant to your workplace and let everyone know that your company is dedicated to the growth of its employees. They will love the chance to learn something new and may even be spurred on to work hard towards a promotion.
Implement Gamification
This strategy is often used in retail/sales/commission-based jobs, as an incentive to get employees to upsell more in exchange for rewards. However, it can be used in any kind of job, to motivate your team to do their best work and get something out of it in return.
If you use a project management platform – like Trello or Basecamp – you could make easy wins for people who complete the most tasks. Of course, ensure that these tasks are roughly the same level of difficulty and take the same amount of time to complete in order to keep things fair and square!
The rewards for hard work can be anything you like – a team outing to a restaurant, a team-building day out, or even a bonus.
Keep Open Channels of Communication
It’s vital to have a company-wide chat platform, where people can send group messages and private mail. This could be as simple as using Skype, or messaging website Slack. It’s a lot less formal than email and means that things get done much faster with instant messages and answers.
It also means that people can easily type to someone in a different department that they don’t get to talk to a lot in real life, keeping colleague relationships close. If you don’t already have an instant chat feature for your team, bring one in ASAP.
