What’s your company’s biggest asset? Many different things may pop into mind, from the products you sell to your customers. But the truth is, there is one thing that forms the foundation for all of it: your employees.

They are the people behind the curtain who make the wheels turn! In fact, according to Gallup, companies with highly engaged employees are over 20% more profitable!

While most companies understand the value of their employees, they still see a high churn rate. In fact, nearly 73% of employees are considering leaving their jobs. Wondering why? The reason is simple: employee disengagement.

The dramatic economic pivots in recent years have left employees and employers scrambling to find a balance. To ensure stability and create an enterprise that can withstand whatever the future has in store, businesses need to invest in employee engagement. After all, these are the people that rally your company forward, ensuring you remain innovative, competitive, and growth-oriented.

The key to an effective employee engagement plan

To nurture a work-culture that brings out the best in each of your people, you need to get to the root of employee engagement. Before you begin to tweak your current plans and strategies in an effort to improve, make sure the foundation is strong. For this, you need to start from the ground up.

• Build trust
  Nothing’s going to work if you don’t have trust.
  Start by being transparent with your employees, be accountable for your shortfalls and ensure there is honesty in communication. The more open and understanding you are, the more likely your employees will be to reach out to you when they face issues.
• Ask questions
  Reach out to your employees to better understand their expectations. Identify what matters to them and what’s holding them back so you can address the experience gaps.
• Ensure anonymity
  There’s no point of asking questions expecting candid responses if you can’t guarantee anonymity. After all, candid feedback often isn’t very nice, and when asked to be open about such things, your employees might be afraid of repercussions. That’s why implementing anonymous surveys, or even bringing in a third party to conduct these surveys, can take you a long way in getting to the truth.
• Be proactive
  The more data you have, the more accurate your insights will be. So don’t just wait for the survey results to come in—proactively reach out to your employees across platforms and at multiple times. You don’t need to keep sending them the same survey, but conduct regular pulse checks, include polls in the mix, and make an active effort to understand just what you can do to help!

Optimize your employee engagement

You’ve got the insights rolling in, but what next?

Understanding the common concerns brings you one step closer to improving the employee experience by creating a laser-focused employee engagement plan.

However, crafting the right strategy is about much more than just addressing the most pressing concerns. You need to begin by understanding your audience. Here’s how you can better understand your employees to optimize your engagement plan:

1. Segment your employees

While you might notice that some concerns are popping up more frequently, you’ll be able to better address the issues if you know who it’s affecting the most.

An easy way to do so is by segmenting your participants to get a better perspective. Here are some ways you can segment responses to improve your insights:

• Branch or location
  You might notice that many employees are complaining about being overworked or working overtime, but when you segment the responses, you might realize that this complaint is predominantly associated with Branch X.
  With this insight in hand, you’ll be able to focus your efforts on improving the branch that needs the most improvement.
• Teams
  Perhaps you notice that some employees are feeling disconnected or overly scrutinized, adding to their stress. But instead of creating a blanket approach that is geared towards everyone, see if this is more common in some teams than others.
  While you can continue company-wide initiatives, this will give you an idea of which teams need the most work, so you can customize your strategy to ensure that the right people get the attention they need.
• Employee journey
  The experiences and concerns of new employees versus those who have been with your company for a while can be significantly different. By grouping all the answers together, you’re likely to lose out on the nuance.
  With pre-population, you can segment your audience to understand which concerns are popping up more for new employees versus for those who have been with your company for a while. By eliminating the noise of large groups, you can understand more focused concerns, making it easier for you to spot turnover trends and take action in time!

2. Understand the root cause

You’ve got the data. You understand what the employee experience gaps are. But have you asked why?

Why are some employees feeling disconnected? Why are some feeling overwhelmed or stressed? Instead of simply solving the concern, look to understand what the root cause is so you can create long-term solutions.

Not only will this give better direction to your engagement plan, but it will also reveal process changes that need to be made so the same issues don’t crop up again!

3. Follow up to measure impact

Employee engagement isn’t just a one-and-done thing. You need to constantly work at and improve your efforts to ensure that your strategies are yielding the impact you’d like. So, send out surveys and keep a track of key metrics such as the employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), employee satisfaction score, and pulse surveys.

This will help you see the impact your efforts have by showing you whether you need to realign priorities, or double-down on something that’s been working.

Transform your employee engagement

The best strategies are data-driven and innovative. Here we’ve explored how you can best leverage insights to optimize your employee engagement plan, steering you in the right direction.

Next in the series, we’ll explore the best ways to address common employee engagement pitfalls, offering innovative solutions to maximize impact.

So, are you ready to get started? Capture the insights you need with SogoEX!