How to Engage Your Team in the Coming Twelve Months

• Employees who feel empowered, respected and like they’re making a difference are more likely to stay on board, and those who don’t have a 35% chance of staying.
• There’s a 76% chance of an employee still being at a company after 12 months, after two years that likelihood drops to 59% and after three years to 48%.
• Over 90% believe there is solid evidence linking engagement to performance, and they believe it has the strongest impact on customer service and productivity.

The pattern from a wide range of research is clear: engaged employees are happier, perform better, and provide a better experience to the end customer.

Let look at some tried and tested way to help you achieve improved employee engagement.

1. Including Wellbeing Training and Learning

Businesses with a strong learning culture enjoy employee engagement and retention rates – between 30% – 50% higher than businesses that don’t. Offering career and development training that includes wellbeing topics would keep 86% of millennials from leaving their jobs.

Wellbeing training should cover evolutionary practices, the three main ones being: Sleep, Diet and Exercise. In addition, at-work training on how to look out for signs of stress and burnout in our colleagues is helpful.

Engaging the services of leading professionals in wellbeing and mental health to offer interactive workshops and seminars to educate staff at all levels will help ensure the company workers’ mental and physical wellbeing is kept a high priority.

Investing in your employees with ongoing job training keeps them engaged in their chosen career path and therefore more committed to the company. Training and development also encourage communication and connection between colleagues who will share knowledge and experience.

Ideally, once started, keep this face to face communication going in order to build relationships and trust.

2. Encourage Social Connections

88% of employees rate connection with their colleagues important to their job satisfaction. However, 73% of employees working in an open planned office fail to talk to one another.

Over the last 20 years, there has been a huge step forward in technology, which has changed the way we communicate both at work and socially. Face-to-face communication has reduced, and we’re at risk of losing the human connection – which is crucial to improving engagement at work.

• 70% of employees said friendships at work is the most crucial element to a happy working life.
• 74% of women surveyed said they would refuse a higher paying job if it meant working with difficult people. 58% of men said the same thing.
• 50% of employees that have a best friend at work reported that they feel a close connection to their company.

After speaking with a number of professionals in the City it was striking to find the majority described their working day as containing little or no personal verbal communication with their peers; it’s always an email. Even if the person is just across the room – email was still the dominant form of communication.

One way to tackle this issue would be to remove individuals from the office and put them in a neutral, social environment. This can be done with an engaging and fun away day, perhaps one that the team has collectively chosen for itself.

Team bonding days have their place – but they are all about work! You are more likely to engage individuals with fun experiences and activities that they would choose for themselves. Imagine offering them a day out they would really love? The sort of thing that they’d happily pay for and organize at the weekends or on a day off in their own time? Imagine how much more impact that would have than something that felt like a ‘work’ day? The interest, excitement, and commitment are already there as it is something they actually want to do and/or experience.

Clearly not everyone will have the same interest for every event/activity that is chosen. Perfect! This gives the employer an opportunity to engage different individuals from across the business who share the same interests, creating a common ground that’s ripe for breaking the ice.

For those who like to do other things then the next engaging Away Day can include those who share more of the same interests. Once there are several groups of engaged individuals talking about their Day, in the days or weeks before and after the event, I am pretty sure they’ll be looking forward to the next one has already started to engage naturally.

Engaging your staff socially out of the office on inspiring and engaging events centered around wellbeing is a sure way to improve morale and in turn productivity for the company. A company away day with a wellbeing theme can generate up to 800% ROI.

3. Offer Flexible Working Conditions

75% of employees say they experience greater productivity when they are working from home. This also reduces commuting time, cost of travel, less daily stress, and a comfortable environment.

The downside to this is isolation; employees risk losing even more connection with their colleagues/peers, especially if they are spending the majority of the week working from home with no human contact.

However, arranging social engagements can help to mitigate this by building relationships and ensuring that the people you are dealing with remotely on a day-to-day basis are not just faceless emails, but real people whose personalities you know. It’s much easier to build a relationship and trust when you share a common interest in an event or activity.

4. Lead by Example

Belief in senior leadership is the No.1 factor in creating positive employee engagement. 58% of employees say they would start a job with a lower salary if they worked for a great boss. 85% of employees say they would stay longer in a company with an employer who shows a high level of social responsibility.

The best way to do this is by example. Don’t tell them about your great leadership – show them through your own actions. If you make a mistake; take responsibility. If you say you will do something; make sure you do it. If you set a deadline; meet it.

5. Empower Employees

Knowing someone and trusting them are two quite different things! So, as well as getting to know your team, have faith in their abilities. Engage employees by empowering them to take responsibility for their work and new challenges.

Give people the autonomy to get the job done in their own unique way. All this ‘trying and doing’ it for themselves develops employees’ skills through experiential learning. Remember that empowering employees means steering clear of micromanaging.

Warning: Other people’s way of doing things may be different from yours (but it just may be better!).

6. Make Roles Clear

Role ambiguity is often cited as a common cause of workplace stress. Failure to address this issue also leads to task duplication and wasted resources. It’s bad news for both employee engagement and business success. If you want to avoid staff burnout and engage employees, you need to set clear expectations.

Research agrees, with a recent Gallup study revealing ‘clear expectations’ as the most ‘foundational’ factor for employee engagement.

By setting clear employee SMART goals, KPIs and expectations from day one staff can better plan and measure their progress. Give each employee the right tools, information, feedback, and training to excel in their role. Ensure each employee knows what to do, how to do it and how their work contributes to the company’s wider goals.

7. Provide Training for Career Progression

Modern workers are motivated by purposeful work and career progression opportunities.

So, to engage employees, give them what they want; personalized training and development to suit their needs. Developing staff skills boosts the expertise, productivity and engagement levels within your organization.

You can use your knowledge of employees’ career goals or interests to tailor training towards staff preferences. This personalized approach keeps employees motivated as they work towards their personal goals within the wider context of the company’s needs.

Training on how to improve employee wellbeing, for example, diet, sleep, and exercise, as well as looking at anxiety and stress levels in the workplace can create agents for change, sharing the knowledge and looking out for those that may need help or advice on being a better them.

8. Have Fun

Studies show 90% of people say a fun work environment is very or extremely motivating.

There are so many ways to have fun and everyone has their personal favorites. An away day for example on an inspiring, engaging and exciting event will build trust, resilience, and connections across the workplace at all levels especially with a Wellbeing theme at its core.

A recent 2019 ‘Simply Health Survey’ monitored by CIPD found that those organizations that had wellbeing activities improved morale and engagement by 44% and lowered sickness by 31%. The survey clearly suggested that many private sector organizations would benefit from a more strategic approach to embracing wellbeing. And yet, R.E.B.A. reports that only 8% of organizations at board level have a wellbeing agenda.

Individuals are more engaged whilst doing an activity which creates a better impact and therefore better results.

Conclusion:

Engaging your staff is an important task for any business. People don’t work well in isolation and when they dread the daily drudge. They generally prefer to know their colleagues and feel that work is a nice place to be with friendly and supportive people whom they trust. They also want to develop themselves, progress their careers, and feel appreciated by their boss and the organization. You can help achieve all of this with say, a day out somewhere nice, doing something everyone will enjoy. Why not make 2020 the year when your team knows how much you appreciate them and what they do?

    Craig Bulow is the founder of Corporate Away Days, a corporate wellbeing events company delivering engaging, inspiring and exciting events focussed on Mindfulness / Wellbeing and Reward / Recognition activities. Corporate Away Days also creates, designs and builds corporate wellbeing policies and provides leading experts for interactive workshops, seminars and talks on improving mental health and overall wellbeing.

Every Corporate Away Days event and activity is chosen with wellbeing as its focus, helping to encourage employee engagement, foster connections and build relationships within the business.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company.