Developing employment engagement strategies focused on creating a people-centric culture is key to attracting and retaining top talent. Strategies such as actively collecting feedback and ideas help team members feel valued and boost job satisfaction.
In a survey by HubSpot, 69% of employees mentioned they would work harder if they felt better appreciated.
An excellent employee engagement strategy includes opening a channel for employees to contribute to building a better business and a more enjoyable workplace through idea generation and implementation.
Sourcing ideas from your team members can highlight aspects of your business where you lack visibility. Alternatively, it can shed light on topics you do not have the time to address. Sourcing insights from your employees gives you access to ideas created within a broad range of perspectives that differ from yours.
Instead of hiring innovation consultants, ask your team to push the boundaries of their creativity and see what happens!
Check out these employee engagement strategies to retain top talent within your company:
1. Create a Space and a Channel for Feedback
A human-centric culture acknowledges the different levels of employee comfort and trust in sharing ideas and feedback.
We suggest your leaders provide input in person or via video and phone calls. If that is not possible, E-mails and text messages are acceptable options for more casual, positive information.
Leaders alone can affect up to 70% of the variance in employee engagement levels. That is why recognition and feedback, comments, and input must come across as genuine and not as prefabricated or generic.
If you are new to “feedback,” we suggest setting SMART goals and identifying when and where you want to provide, request, or receive feedback. As a leader, you always want to harvest constructive input.
As a business leader, I started collecting feedback at the end of my meetings. I would finish my meetings 3-5 minutes earlier than the scheduled time. I would then use those extra minutes to ask my team how they perceived it went and how we could improve.
This was great- my meetings became effective and for the most part, succinct. I then expanded my feedback-gathering efforts to include space for comments at the beginning of my sessions. Meetings started with a quick agenda revision. I then asked the team if I had missed any topics or if we should add new topics to that day’s discussion.
Depending on the person or topic, I ask for feedback over a phone call or invite people to a coffee.
For me, asking for input and insights has been quintessential to my career success. It has become second nature. Even today, I continue to develop new tools to gather feedback and insights on a wide range of topics.
Software solutions that provide two-way feedback between employees and employers offer a great framework to integrate insights and input on a grander scale. With MurmurattoTM you can boost engagement levels by giving employees a voice and acknowledging their contributions.
2. Highlight Decisions Made on Feedback
Have you ever proposed an idea to someone in your company and lost track of it? We have! We call this the black hole effect.
Highlighting feedback-inspired decisions shows members of your organization how important it is to request, consider and incorporate feedback. This employee engagement strategy helps you showcase the potential benefits and impact of diverse employee ideas on an organization’s performance.
In a human-centric culture, employees should have a space to voice their ideas. Leaders should proactively set expectations for how these are shared and addressed.
Transforming employee ideas into actions strengthens your people-centered culture.
Whenever I develop new strategies for our organization, I ask for feedback from team members who have abilities and perspectives that are different from mine.
A couple of years ago, I enlisted a co-worker known for boycotting initiatives with his ability to create hypothetical scenarios. After designing my product launch strategy and execution plan, I scheduled a presentation to show him what I had worked on.
He then proceeded to provide specific hypotheticals and shared real-life experiences that I had failed to consider. My proactive approach to identifying gaps in my plan, and integrating a diversity of perspectives, helped me create an almost bullet-proof launch plan.
The fact that I acknowledged his feedback during my presentations made him an ally for the product launch. It also built trust for many other co-workers to provide and request feedback from me.
3. Employment Engagement is all About Encouraging Collaboration
A people-centric organization can help improve workplace collaboration. You build trust between employees and leaders by providing well-intentioned, clear, and constructive feedback.
Unlike organizations where individuals and teams work in silos, a human-centric culture offers an environment conducive to collaboration.
Collaborative environments can result in fantastic synergy, which makes your organization perform better and deliver more robust results.
Today we have a multi-disciplinary team working on solutions to improve team engagement, increase employee motivation, and build better-performing organizations and healthier, more enjoyable workplaces.
I interact with all our teams on an almost daily basis. Still, sometimes our busy agendas do not allow them to share insights on content, tools, strategies, or in-process implementations. This is something we are proactively working to improve!
Nonetheless, I always enjoy pivoting to team members working on delivering another aspect of our vision to ask for their insights and opinions.
Our software development team, for example, joins our client success manager in meetings with their clients. This allows them to understand whom they are writing code for. It also helps them build empathy into our products which results in fantastic product enhancements and new features.
It also provides them with data and context to be critical and challenge new features I incorporate into our roadmaps.
4. Start Acting on Employee Input & Insight
Remember, unless they are acted upon, good intentions, ideas, and feedback will not yield impacting results.
As in most cases, focusing on starting small is a great way to get the ball rolling. (Have you heard that one before? That is because it’s true!)
Here are some things we suggest you consider:
- What is the goal of my feedback?
- What is the action/constructive portion?
- Who provides it? Who receives it?
- How often does it occur?
- What channel/medium will I use to offer and gather feedback?
- Do I have (Am I providing) enough information and details to act on it?
Identifying opportunities to gather or provide intentional feedback can help unlock employee potential and develop more effective teams.
If you cannot act on a specific idea or topic, make sure you communicate it to your team members. This is better than letting their input fall into the infamous idea black hole.
Conclusion
Approach feedback from the perspective of gift-giving! Hiring new talent is a challenging, sometimes lengthy process.
Instead of reactively dealing with turnover (hiring people to fill existing vacancies), why not address it proactively (work hard to retain your people)?
We know how hard it is to find great talent. We know how hard it is to develop people with potential into great performers and leaders.
That is why we know that creating a healthy work environment is essential. Continuously gathering employee input and insights is critical to your business’ success.
By creating a psychologically safe environment that embraces ideas, feedback, insights, and conversations, we promote innovation. We help you achieve game-changing results while simultaneously increasing employee engagement levels.
Let us know what employee engagement strategies have worked for you and your team!
