What is employee engagement?
You can engage your employees by tapping into their potential and enthusiasm for their work. To do this, it helps to build a relationship of trust and integrity with your employees, which works both ways. The first step towards achieving this dynamic between you and your employees is working out what makes them come to work every day. What gets your employees excited may differ from individual to individual. However, there are some general considerations to take into account, such as helping your employees feel included as part of a team. This involves ensuring that your employees understand where their duties fit into the bigger picture of your business strategy and that they feel their hard work is rewarded appropriately.
What most drives employee engagement in the UK
According to a UK survey one of the most important factors for employee engagement is giving your employees good career development opportunities. Therefore, creating a clear career trajectory for your employees should be at the forefront of your employee performance management strategy. The same survey showed that employees are 17% more engaged if you enrol them in a feedback programme, where you give them regular updates about their performance. What motivates employees may differ according to demographic, such as by age or gender. According to a Statista survey, one of the perks that Generation Z employees find most exciting is financial wellness perks. This includes retirement plans, personal financial counselling and the repaying of their student loans. You can offer perks as part of your employee engagement plan by using them as incentives for reaching targets and strong team efforts. It is useful if the perks package you offer is indiscriminate and appealing to employees from all situations and backgrounds.
How to keep your employees’ focus
Keeping your employees focussed and productive is much easier when you tap into their basic needs, as well as once you have an understanding of how they use their time. Consider first whether your employees are working remotely, or whether they are working in an office space. You may have to take different actions to ensure that your employees remain focused in a shared office space compared to if they are working remotely. Here are a few pointers for keeping your employees’ focus levels high regardless of where they are working:
- Ensure that their working environment is comfortable, such as by providing adequate seating with lumbar support for improved posture;
- Provide regular opportunities to learn new skills, which you can develop using apps and quizzes;
- Arrange team-building exercises that are fun, productive and sociable;
- Delegate tasks to appropriate team members;
- Strike a balance between employees feeling adequately challenged by their duties while still feeling comfortable in their ability to achieve great results.
How to incorporate soft HRM into your performance management strategy
Soft HRM involves managing your employees in a way that prioritises them in your business. When your employees feel that you see them as integral to your business, this can be a great boost to employee morale and can result in higher productivity. This HR management style is contrasted with hard HRM, which does not centre your employee’s personal development or morale. Instead, with this model, they are treated as a means to an end for your company’s profit. A soft HRM approach uses a more democratic, cooperative management style, while a hard HRM approach will require a more authoritarian, directive management style. You may find that a combination of hard and soft HRM styles work for your business. It is a good idea to treat employees as individuals with their own needs if you want to keep employee retention high and to maintain happy, healthy employees. However, you may also find that employees need a more authoritarian or top-down management style when working towards big deadlines or targets. Achieving this degree of balance may require some adjustment over time. Consider listening to and integrating feedback from staff on management styles to keep them both happy and motivated.
Employee appraisal strategies
Consider having monthly and yearly employee appraisals to keep track of productivity across every team in your organisation. With the right strategy, employee appraisals can be a useful tool for analysing the shifting nature of your employee’s skillset and responsibilities. This is because as your business develops and with changes in technology, you may require your employees to have slightly different skill-sets. Appraisals can inform the exact kinds of training your employees may need, helping you with mapping out a plan for their future development. Some types of performance reviews include:
Managing according to objectives
A popular performance review technique is Management by Objectives (MBO), which involves holding a one-to-one meeting between the employee and their manager. During the meeting, they discuss and evaluate that employee’s performance over the prior six-month period. Discussions over performance and setting of targets should ideally adhere to SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-sensitive). However, you may find that with long-term or less rigidly attainable goals, SMART objectives are less crucial. In more dynamic and fluid work cultures, you may need to think outside the box with your employee to reach targets.
Following this evaluation period, you may choose to reward your employees based on these results. If your employee is not making professional progress or is struggling to meet targets, you may decide to give them further training or a warning. This will often depend on what you believe will result in a more productive outcome.
360-degree feedback
An increasingly popular performance review strategy is 360-degree feedback. This involves gathering performance feedback on an employee from managers, customers, reports and colleagues. A strength of this performance review model is that it helps avoid any negative biases that a line manager might have regarding an employee. It is therefore potentially a fairer method of assessing an employee’s performance.
Although this model can be highly beneficial, you should make sure to be specific about the kinds of feedback you are looking for on an employee. You will need to think carefully about what aspects of your employee’s behaviour and performance you are looking to review, and why this is important for their assessment.
Streamline your approach further by creating a checklist of questions that you would like answered about an employee’s performance. That way, you can compare feedback results from clients, managers and peers with more ease. You will be able to see if there are any differences in opinion regarding an employee’s performance in certain areas. If there seems to be a difference in opinion here, it may give you an insight into your employee’s unique role in the organisation. This may be in terms of which employees they work best with, and what situations they are best at handling.
Self-appraisal
Although managers should not ideally rely on self-appraisal as a performance review model, it can be a useful complement to the above models. Giving your employees some autonomy to review their performance can help them to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses.
Giving your employees time to review their performance can be helpful before an MBO meeting, as they will be able to discuss performance targets in more detail with their manager. It is therefore less likely to be a one-sided conversation, and ultimately will be more useful to both parties. Another point to consider is that it is all very well guiding employees through performance targets, but it is even more helpful if they understand how and why they need to improve in certain areas. When employees take responsibility for their careers, they may be more motivated and feel a sense of purpose in their role. You may be surprised at what employees deem to be weaknesses in their performance. Conscientious employees may not always recognise their efforts. Therefore, providing positive follow-up feedback after an employee’s self-appraisal can be a great opportunity to congratulate them for their hard work.
Further reading
