Five ways to successful employee engagement in the New Year

Employee engagement is essential to keep employees motivated in the organization and its work, motivated to continue to achieve goals and to retain your top talent. However, too often companies don’t consider that employees need to be kept engaged until they begin to notice rumblings of discontent.

Here are 5 ways to engage your employees in the New Year:

1. For managers: Regularly meet with employees one-on-one. One-on-one meetings enable for personal connections with your employees and also enables for ensuring that they are using their particular skills and knowledge. The better we get to know staff, the better we can ensure we utilize their talents most effectively and enable for them to continue to grow professionally.
2. For managers: Schedule monthly team meetings. Monthly team meetings enables the full group to get together to build relationships with each other, share best practices and collaborate to solve challenges. For virtual teams, ensure the use of a virtual meeting platform to better engage remote staff and have the entire team come together in one location at least once or twice a year.
3. For organizational leaders: Develop cross-functional process improvement teams. These teams will be responsible for evaluating areas of the business to look for possible improvements in how the work gets done. Such initiatives engage employees in finding better ways to accomplish the work by providing them ownership in determining how best to get the work done. The best people to improve workflow processes are those who are doing the work of the business!
4. For organizational leaders: Get staff involved in strategic planning sessions. Invite staff, representing all functional areas and various job roles/functions to attend parts of the organizational strategical planning process. It is a great way for them to learn more about the successes and challenges of the organization, understand how decisions are made for key initiatives to be completed throughout the year and also to contribute based on what they see happening in the business.
5. For all: Regularly reach out to staff. Utilize a number of forums – such as all staff meetings, department meetings, divisional meetings, collaboration portals, internal newsletters/emails, internal sites, etc. – to engage staff in any number of discussions and collaborative problem solving. Additionally, use these forums to acknowledge the efforts of staff and share the good work going on among individuals and teams.

Employees who feel involved in the business, whose opinions, suggestions and ideas are considered and valued, are engaged employees. Engaged employees are committed to the organization and its customers. Happy, engaged employees = happy customers.