The 3 Common Mistakes in Employee Engagement

Unfortunately, the levels of employee engagement around the world are quite bleak. Research firm Gallup reports that 87 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged. It means that every organization has a larger amount of employees who are not putting their best at work. And they affect the results of businesses. Companies with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by as much as 147 percent. 

Many teams often think that their employees are engaged without really understanding whether this is the case. Here’s how to really understand what’s going on in your company and make sure your team is fully engaged. Read more: Company Culture: The Key to Employee Engagement.

What might be going wrong when trying to engage employees?

Insufficient awareness of the company’s mission

An important way to engage employees is to emphasize the company’s mission, values, and goals. Adapting employees to the company’s mission, improves the strategy of all departments, as it becomes a driving force. Emphasizing the mission also helps to improve customer engagement, as employees are better able to communicate with customers, and this provides clarity to internal processes. By strengthening the mission in company meetings and praising the employees who demonstrate it, it is possible to improve the team’s connection with the company.

Another problem in companies is the strict separation between management and employees. Namely, management tends to be very engaged, enthusiastic and introduces new values or missions throughout the organization. However, employees often do not show the same enthusiasm. The reason for this is most often because the employees have not been part of the process and the news is not emotionally related to them, so it is important not only to emphasize the mission but to come to it together.

Lack of interaction between employees

The feeling of loneliness at work has a negative effect on productivity (and on the overall well-being of employees). Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Sacramento found that employee loneliness negatively affects productivity, teamwork, and employee commitment. Even if your teams work in the same office, but only work with computers and do not facilitate people-to-people contacts, many employees may feel lonely. The newest researches show that it’s most common for remotely working people, as well as for young employees.

Internal processes are not optimized

Improving the company’s internal operations is extremely important for employees. According to Business News Daily, many emails and pointless meetings are two of the main problems employees face at work when thinking about internal communication. Two-thirds of employees say more than 20 percent of emails they receive are not relevant. Three-quarters of employees during meetings admit that they engage in multitasking or perform several tasks at the same time because the employee is overloaded or feels that the meeting is not worth paying attention to. It is important to survey employees to get to know how would they describe effective communication.

The development of technologies and the choice of systems to work with must focus on efficiency – how easy it’s gonna be to use for all teams. Also, the roles of each employee must be clearly defined so that they know what they are responsible for and they should not receive information that does not concern them. It is crucial to use communication methods that are as tailored as possible to the wishes of the employees. Gallup reports that a development strategy implemented by managers based on employee strengths can increase employee engagement by 23 percent.

While employee engagement is a universal challenge, your business is likely to be nuanced and face your unique needs with engagement. Use internal surveys to ask employees to help improve their level of engagement and happiness. Train managers on how to communicate effectively with teams and get personal feedback from teammates. Don’t try to guess, instead, regularly ask for ideas on how to improve the internal processes and technological tools used by your business. As you begin to implement employee expectations into your business, they will see that you value their feedback and want to make them happy at work. Read more: Best Practices on How to Engage Small Work Teams.