Disengaged employees can be the death of a business.
Which begs the age-old question, How do I keep my employees engaged and productive? Unfortunately, there is no single, simple answer to this question. It is a process with many steps and layers to consider. But if you want to know where it starts, it’s from the top.
Leadership
Research has repeatedly demonstrated a correlation between how people are managed, and employee attitudes and business performance. In fact, according to Gallup, statistically, people don’t leave jobs, they leave bad managers.
Leaders who take the time to listen to the concerns of their people, celebrate their successes and provide opportunities and support for career and personal growth see an increase in overall employee mindset. If people feel leadership is invested in them, they are more inclined to put that investment back into the company. The important of positive relationships are evidenced by profit, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, productivity, innovation, staff retention, efficiency and even increased awareness of health and safety. To this end you need to pay attention to the relationship between leadership, management, and the teams they look after.
Investing in management training will enable you to build a proper system of support from the top down. This can open the door to clear communication with your people and lead to a direct, positive impact on the rest of your business. Employees feeling safe to share their thoughts and opinions on working for your company is an important element in the next aspect of fostering strong employee engagement.
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
It is extremely important to establish how your employees feel about working at your company. If you manage a team of employees, you should be asking the right questions:
- Are they enjoying the culture within the company?
- Are they happy in their daily work activities?
- Do they feel they are being treated properly and fairly?
- Do they feel supported when needed?
- Is there potential for career development if desired?
- Are they happy with their working conditions and environment?
The easiest way to perform this research is to carry out regular employee interviews or surveys. There are many options of online platforms where you can conduct anonymous surveys to help you gain these insights. Though if you feel professional experience and support would be beneficial for your company, this is something the team at Bigmore Benefits can help you with.
Larger companies might also want to consider running focus groups to study opinions, or even utilising online forums that employees can access via the company’s intranet. The results will generally indicate the same areas coming under scrutiny. This might include salary and benefits, internal communication, personal development, line management etc.
By establishing where the gaps are, you can begin to make improvements. Each area will have a different approach when it comes to addressing it and we are going to look at a few of them now.
Pay and Employee Benefits
In relation to pay and benefits, employees are becoming more and more interested in what their employers are providing. The right salary package is important yes, but it is often not enough to attract and retain top talent. Employees are also interested in the other elements that make up a full compensation package.
For example, Employee Benefits are a great tool to put in place if you have not already done so. Core Employee Benefits, which are very cost effective, can include Life Assurance, Employee Assistance Programmes and Private Medical Insurance. If your company is struggling with the cost required to provide these benefits, there are plenty of strategies or products to keep costs low, as well as the option of Voluntary Benefits. These can cost almost nothing for companies to implement and include Healthcare Cash Plans, Cycle to Work Schemes and even setting up pension via salary sacrifice. These will not only entice employees to accept their offer of employment but will also greatly assist with employee retention.
Communication and Employee Engagement
In some ways technology has made communication more challenging. There are emails, communication platforms like Teams, CRM systems, project management platforms, company intranets. Sometimes the sheer number of options available for communication leads to confusion, missed messages and overwhelm that causes disengagement. This can make it very tricky to ensure the right communications are being read by the right people at the right time on the right platform.
It is up to employers to make sure they are providing the correct communication in a timely and up-to-date way. Since we cannot control how others end up engaging with the comms you put out, we will focus on what you as a business can, and perhaps should, do specifically around building engagement.
Clarity in Communication
Having a clear list of all communication channels and their intended purposes is probably the most important. Ensuring that your people know where to go to find the details of their employee benefits, or information on any internal team building initiatives can be the first step to them engaging with what is available.
Keeping these comms simple, clear and consistent will also make a difference. For example, if your people know that on the first Monday of every month a company newsletter will be released with all relevant companywide info, they will know to look out for and engage with it. Company intranets also provide a good place to keep and publicise this information. Intranets can hold the comms and content that might not be relevant to their day to day tasks, but relevant to the benefits of their employment. It’s also important to consider the different neuro diverse requirements of your team, so providing a range of joined up communications in different formats is hugely beneficial.
Use Your Voice
It should also be pointed out that in a world of screen-based comms, picking up the phone, meeting one on one, or having in person company meetings breaks up the monotony of technology and enables leaders to communicate in a different way.
We have an entire guide on Communicating an Employee Engagement Package which you can access below. This is a topic we are very passionate about as communication provides the basis for all healthy and productive relationships. If you can get this right, it will pay off in spades.
Learning & Development
Building an L&D plan should involve input from both the company and the employee. With certain careers, there is a clear growth trajectory. Yet with other roles, it might not be so straight forward. There will be certain, obvious things which a person needs to learn to advance in their career. These should certainly feature in the L&D plan as it gives employees the chance to grow, provides a goal to focus on and contributes to their feeling of investment in the business.
There might also be a particular skill or area the employee is interested in developing which might not be the most obvious for their role. It could be that the business cannot resource their request, or that it sits too far out of their remit to be justifiable. But having the conversation and being upfront about the decisions made could give your employee a sense of inclusion and care from leadership. Including the employee in this discussion ensures that their needs and wants are heard and understood.
Bigmore Benefits Can Help You Build Engagement
We hope that you will now see there is so much you can do within your company to get your employees engaged and to value their job. And the best part is that many of the practical measures we are recommending can be implemented with very little cost to the business.
If you would like additional support with your employee engagement strategy, let Bigmore Benefits help. Whether is surveying your teams, assessing your benefits or implementing a health & wellbeing strategy our years of experience have been proven to make a difference for the companies we partner with.
Employees are our biggest assets. Look after them, engage them and ensure they remain motivated. As the great Zig Ziglar once said; “You don’t build a business –you build people– and then people build the business”
Article by Dave Sykes
Director, Bigmore Benefits
Increase your Employee Engagement with Bigmore Benefits
To have a chat about your employee engagement needs or concerns, fill out the contact form below.
Autumn Budget 2025
Previous post