Engagement is a curious term. It covers a promise to get married, beginning hostilities with the enemy, becoming politicised or even just exhibiting charm and empathy. For employers it usually means a basket of techniques to encourage employees to stay longer or work harder. When things are tough most organisations cut back on what they regard as ‘the fluffy stuff’ - being nice to staff when you don’t have to be seems to fall into that category, especially when there are no other jobs for employees to go to.
But loyalty cuts both ways. When the economy starts to rise and people look around for other career options they begin to take notice of what employers are actively doing to try and retain staff and make their working lives more pleasant. We all know that improving bonuses and raising salaries can work, but they are normally a short term fix for the best employees. What an employer really needs to create is a working environment where not only do staff want to come into work, they are also actively involved in getting things done better, more comfortably and more efficiently.
So, the business owners’ imperative should be to enable these people to do that more often. It has been reckoned that about 60 per cent of any workforce is engaged at any one time, on average. Return on investment calculations show that there is a strong correlation between every percentage point of positive engagement and profit before tax. Retail shows the strongest links as the numbers for yield per square foot are monitored all the time. That makes doing the sums very easy. If nothing else changes except the level of employee engagement then the reason for success must be ‘better engagement’.
But what do you need to do exactly to engage people with your business? The techniques are not airy-fairy ‘attitude’ sessions where everyone agrees to be nicer to each other. There are some specific things you can introduce to improve engagement. The good, old suggestion scheme is a no-brainer. These days they are online and known as ‘ideas programmes’. Retail gift cards can be offered for every idea (to encourage participation) and bigger rewards related to any actual revenue-generating or cost-saving ideas mentioned can be presented. Sanction the regular organisation of social events, allow time in the working day for them to be organised, throw in some funding…not everything… and generally make yourself available to get involved if they want you to be. The more reasons people have to stay than leave, the better their loyalty and the more likely they will ask their friends to join them as new recruits… another money-saver.
If you are worried about employees doing their job in a particular way it may be worth defining what you stand for and rewarding employees for showing those values or behaviours at work. This is known as a peer-recognition scheme. Again such programmes work best on the intranet. The rewards for doing things the ‘right way’ can be token or fun items as the real power comes from being recognised by colleagues for doing a good job.
Another way to foster teamwork is to sit employees in groups, not closed offices or in rows. There is much more interaction when people have eye-contact and many process errors can be eliminated, if people are constantly talking or listening to each other within the office environment.
PIP (performance improvement process) groups are an extension of teamwork by letting employees fix the nitty gritty of everyday irritations without getting senior management involved. Depending on the size of your organisation you can set up a cross-functional PIP group for say ‘admin processes’ that meets every month with sandwiches provided by the bosses to walk through any process ideas to make things better. For example instead of everyone deciding what rate of postal cost to use for each item being sent out and then sending them out individually, agree a policy and let one person send them out. Not only would this save money, it would be more efficient if ‘expensive’ people are wasting time sorting out mundane postal issues.
Another idea could be to run a ‘skills’ book online so that others in the office can look up who can do what. Languages, first aid, past employers, unusual qualifications, famous relatives, strange hobbies, children’s ages, members of clubs or associations etc. By itself the information may not mean much but it encourages employees to see their colleagues as proper human beings with real lives with whom you can ‘engage’ on a human level rather than the usual formal ties that most of us have at work. You would be surprised how much more talented your staff are than is shown in their job descriptions.
As the recruitment market is very buoyant right now business should be good and getting better. So now is not the time to be losing staff to competitors for silly reasons. Most people leave jobs because of the management style of the organisation they work for rather than ‘the package’. So by paying attention to engagement techniques - some of which are very simple ideas to implement - you can not only retain more staff but as a result make more profit. Being nice to staff should not only make them easier to manage but deliver a better business for you…what’s not to like about better engaged employees?
John Fisher’s book Strategic Brand Engagement is available through the usual channels, published by Kogan Page in 2014
