Employee Engagement In The Workplace

One of most difficult challenge in front of the managers is to involve their employees for a common cause. Employee engagement in the workplace is a task in itself just because you deal with not one but plenty of different individuals. Each person gets motivated by different set of variables and incorporating them all for a common cause sometimes becomes a little tricky. You need employee engagement not only for work but also for promoting different attributes like goodwill, closeness, friendship, team work etc. These are soft factors that hold plenty of importance and are important ingredient in the success of any organization.

The benefits of employee engagement in the workplace are tremendous. It forms the base of exceptional results when you have the diverse group work as one. This is the reason that though employee engagement is quite a challenging task it is considered as must for any organization.

The employee engagement essentially comes in two forms

1) Work Related- This type of employee engagement requires involving employees in a task that relates to their work. It can be target based or a project work and one that involves different members to work as a team.

2) Non- Work Related- This can be extracurricular activities carried out by organization at different intervals for the well being of their employees. Though this does not relates to their work but it is important from organization point of view for employees.

The advantage in work related employee engagement is that since it directly relates to their jobs and this is something on which their evaluation depends, willingly or unwillingly the employees gets motivated to do it. They may not like many factors but since it involves their personal growth they tend to get positive about it. But scenario is different when these activities are not work related. Here the Employee does not gets evaluated and they get involved only if they have a personal interest in it.

If you need to solve the problem of employee engagement in the workplace you need think from the perspective of the employees only. This can be done by asking a simple question to yourself

What’s In It For Me?

Yes, each individual is different has different stimulus that motivates them. If you can find answer to the above question from the angle of all employees you would be much closer to solve this problem.

In case of Work related the answer lies in

1) How it would help them grow

2) How it would help them learn

3) Does it helps them to elevate their position

4) How monetary benefits gets affected

5) Does it bring a good position and more opportunity for them?

In case of Non- Work related the answer lies in

1) Is this interesting

2) Is this enjoyable

3) Will it help promote my image

4) Am I gone loose something if i give it a miss

5) Does it concern my work and help me in that area too

You can see, each question that concern employee engagement in the workplace relates to what’s in it for me? The more capable you are to answer that the more success you can get from your initiatives.

It is essentially all about motivation that gets you the employee engagement. Put the right bait and you can catch the desired outcome. As a Thumb rule, few questions that you can ask yourself before designing any program that needs the employee engagement in the work place are

1) Motivation- Does it have an element of motivation in it. In what manner it motivates the employees

2) Reward- Does it rewards employee in any manner. If yes make sure it gets communicated clearly in your communication

3) Outcome- What is the desired outcome you want to achieve and how it would help employees. If you are clear let the employees also know how it would help them.

4) Nature- Would it be interesting for the employees or it would be another boring stuff. Does it have an element that can elicit interest in employees, if yes highlight it.

5) Hype- Has enough hype been created. Remember sometimes people do not even know that things of such sort even exist. Advertising and creating enough hype gets you good response too.

A poor response in itself is a good indication that something is not going right. In such scenarios it is not the employees who needs to be blamed but the leader who rolls out the plan. Remember, there is no bad team but only bad leaders. You need to play your cards right to get the desired outcome. Employee engagement in the workplace is all about analysis and innovation, get it right and you get what you need for them. Go plan it with care keeping above factors in mind and the results would never disappoint you.

Picture- Nikita Kashner