Employee engagement is often talked about in business, but it is not always entirely understood.
If you’re running a business but you are struggling to comprehend exactly what you need to do to incite employee engagement, then it is important to look at your practices and do a little research into how they can be improved. In order to do this, it’s best to learn from other businesses’ mistakes.
It may seem harsh, but benefitting your own company by looking at how other companies have failed is a great way to avoid potholes before you fall into them, as well as ensure your employees remain engaged and loyal. With this in mind, here are a few mistakes that you should avoid:
Going It Alone
Of course, you are reading an article that will help you to formulate a good employee engagemenet plan, but if you are planning to integrate this yourself, then you’ve fallen into another trap. Employee engagement is not easy, and in order to provide consistency, it is integral that you find a company who can offer help with a focused, substantiated engagement program.
The company www.incentivesmart.com, for instance, is renowned for well-established and meaningful customer and employee loyalty programs. Do a little research into them and you will find that the facts and figures of engagement are not so simple. There are a lot of intricacies when it comes to employee engagement, especially, so you need the assistance of a company who is well versed and equipped to get the best results possible.
Money Doesn’t Always Make The World Go Round
While monetary rewards for good work might seem like a nice and easy idea, this points more toward a company’s lack of understanding (or altogether disregard) of employee engagement than it does to a well thought through employee rewards program.
The truth is, 77% of human behaviour is driven by emotional connections and culture. In this way, it is not an effective rewards program to simply hand out cash rewards for recognition. On the contrary, employee recognition should be about recognising the employees themselves. It should be a personalised accentuation of company values and the values placed on an employee’s hard work.
Your Employees Are Not Statistics
When thinking about employee engagement, it can be easy to think you’re doing a good job by rewarding employees based on performance. After all, that will surely get employees to engage with the program, right? Wrong. Rewarding employees simply for meeting targets is basically like telling them that nothing else matters. If you do this, then you are promoting a lie that they are simply in the business to reach a target and provide a favourable statistic.
Instead, you should be rewarding employees based on their communication skills, integrity, timeliness, organisation; the list goes on and on. But the point is, you are rewarding employees based on their performance as a whole, rather than in one (albeit important) field. This will similarly engage all your employees and prove to them that they are valued.
