Employee Engagement – Just how motivated and satisfied are your employees?
Growing organisations face a great many challenges as they increase in size and turnover, one of these is communication. Inconsistent communication creates silos and break-downs not just between business units, but also departments, supervisors and the team of employees. Typically, it is this growth which results in many companies falling prey to overly bureaucratic, top down types of communication. The importance of motivating and engaging employees is well documented. Satisfied employees contribute more in terms of organisational productivity, dedication to ‘go the extra mile’ and commitment to offering superior customer satisfaction.
Engaged employees display contentment – this permeates across to customers (where the brand, its revenue and the customer experience/loyalty generally are always at stake). Also critical to having engaged employees is giving them ‘voice’. Getting employee feedback plays a vital role with helping companies increase their employee retention. Organisations need, therefore, to measure satisfaction and the levels of engagement of their people.
Implementing surveys and creating other feedback imperatives whilst encouraging employees to engage in continued dialogue, also highlights common themes impacting across the culture/fabric of an organisation, some of these an executive management team may remain blissfully unaware of. Organisational voice negates employees’ perception of being a dispensable, interchangeable part of a company (i.e. it emphasises that person’s role as vital to the collective, and promotes a feeling of influence and sway in helping to shape the company and its future. This ultimately only deepens their ongoing commitment to that company and encourages wider, proactive dialogue.
Many senior managers just assume employees are satisfied and engaged; somewhat of a short-sighted, ‘head in the sand’ approach. Running online employee engagement surveys determine with greater certainty employee sentiment. It takes an accurate pulse check on morale, key trends, and patterns of hygiene and motivational factors impacting on the business such as clarity of roles, responsibilities, job satisfaction, collegial work environment, intention to stay, to advocate your organisation etc.
For obvious reasons, engagement surveys are best run independently of the organisation requiring the research. Confidentiality of the process and protecting the identities of respondents from any reciprocity or demeaning action arising out of possible identification is paramount. With an organisation-wide buy-in to the survey process, this independent impartiality results in the ability to elicit much more open, honest and considered employee feedback. It also has a positive influence upon the degree to which employees trust the findings and outcomes relayed back to them.