How to Improve Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has a direct impact on your company’s profitability and productivity so building an employee engagement strategy should be a top priority to help develop your competitive advantage.

Your employees are the interface between your company and your customers and prospects, even if they are at the end of an email, phone call, eCommerce platform or back there in the warehouse. What they think, do, feel filters through to your customers. So it makes sense that the more engaged they are with their work and the service they provide, the better that customer experience will be.

The Cost of Poor Employee Engagement

Poor employee engagement incurs significant costs for businesses. It leads to decreased productivity, higher turnover rates, and increased absenteeism. When employees are disengaged, they're less motivated to contribute innovative ideas or go the extra mile, hindering company growth. Moreover, disengaged employees often deliver subpar customer service, tarnishing the company's reputation.

The financial impact includes recruitment expenses, training costs for new hires, and lost revenue due to decreased efficiency. Ultimately, poor engagement undermines organisational success.

Improving employee engagement will help increase staff productivity as they take on more ownership of service delivery issues and create more effective communications with team members.

Improving Employee Engagement Lifts Customer Loyalty and Spend

The best employees want to feel they have a voice, are respected and that their opinions and work are valued. Building a positive service culture will help improve employee loyalty and increase employee retention rates. This lifts the front-line delivery and service experience, driving increased customer loyalty and a higher customer lifetime value. It increases staff productivity.

It makes the difference between showing up for work just to pay the mortgage, clock watching and feeling a part of a dynamic, successful team that motivates you to go that extra mile. It’s a slippery slope though, when poor performance sets-in, it’s contagious, nobody wants to stand-out, bonding with co-workers will trump the latest management motivating speech.

 How to Improve Employee Engagement

1. Understand first before trying to be understood. Why does your staff act as they do today if you feel they behave in ways not in keeping with the desired company culture?

2. How empowered are your staff when customer service issues arise to resolve those issues there are then on your behalf?

3. Do you know, is it defined, how people should behave within your organisation towards each other, towards your customers?

4. Are you recruiting the right people with the right mindset and attitude for each job function?

5. Are you inviting employee feedback?

Establish Effective Feedback Systems

Feedback systems work providing they work, that is the feedback is listened to, heard, acknowledged and action is taken where appropriate.