Employee engagement drives performance. An engaged employee feels at home when they’re at work, takes accountability and is loyal to their company. As a manager, you want to motivate your employees to feel that way. But, Gallop research shows that 51% of employees aren’t engaged, and they haven’t been for a while now.

So What Can You Do To Grow Employee Engagement?

Offer Training

Employees want to improve, and they want their company to help them achieve that. In fact, many polls show that workers, especially millennials (87% of them!), find professional development one of the most important factors when deciding whether to stay or leave the job.

Employees want a clear path to career advancement, which drags along higher accountability and bigger compensation. Help them feel like an important part of the company by arranging an individual face-to-face meeting, where you’ll discuss their goals, and how you can help in achieving them.

Encourage employees to take on new projects. Look up to Google. They encouraged workers to use as much as 20% of work time (which is one day per week) to work on a related passion project, which resulted in Gmail, Google Maps, Google News, AdSense…

Incentives

Employees who don’t get recognition are twice as likely to quit their job, according to research. Feeling appreciated for their work is important to employees’ happiness, and therefore for their engagement.

Think about the ways you’ll show your appreciation to individual employees. Sometimes the most effective way to make them feel valued and important is to reward them with something the rest of the employees won’t necessarily have.

This doesn’t have to be something expensive – a simple ‘Thank you’ note, or even an ‘Employee of The Month’ cup can be really encouraging.

Nurture Open Communication

Since employee engagement means they feel like a part of the team, it’s important to encourage them to share their ideas and suggestions, and give their honest opinions, both positive and negative. There’s a big difference between an employee who gives their bare minimum in order to receive their monthly salary, and an employee who gives their best to help their team and company achieve their goals. It’s the other one that helps your company grow, so help them be engaged by giving them more of a say.

Give Regular Feedback

I hope you’ve been catching up with the relevant statistics, because annual performance reviews are yesterday’s news. It became too obvious that they barely ever bring positive outcomes. It’s somewhat obvious – imagine doing the same thing for 365 days, and only then being told that isn’t quite the correct way to do it. Really motivating, right?

Encourage employees by giving them timely feedback, which will help them improve their performance to reach the company’s expectations.

When employees put their blood, sweat and tears into their work, they want to know the results. Giving them an update on how they’re helping the company achieve its goals is important to keep them motivated. And when done right, this goes for both positive and negative feedback. They don’t just want to know what they’re doing well, but also where they’re making mistakes, in order to fix them. If delivered as constructive advice and not critique, negative feedback can be as influencing as a positive one, if not even more.

Care About Their Health

Working under deadlines can be pretty stressful even for those who adore their jobs, and can ultimately affect that adoration. You’ve heard about burnout. Well, did you know that around 23% of employees often or always feel burned out at work? Another 44% feel that way sometimes.

What’s even worse, one in four Americans goes to work sick, and as much as two out of three of them work while on vacation. Also, last year’s study showed that 52% of Americans didn’t use all of their vacation days. While loving your job is amazing, at that pace, getting a burnout is inevitable. Remember, sick employees aren’t engaged, neither emotionally nor physically.

Encourage your employees to take days off when sick, and to use their vacation time. They might restrain from taking those free days because they fear no one can do their job. So, create a vacation policy – insist on them taking their vacations, to recharge their batteries and come back to work satisfied and engaged.

Measure Performance

Numbers are motivating. Both you and your employees want to know where you’re standing and how you can improve. To gain real insight into your performance, use employee time tracking software.

Employee time tracking solutions can be used to split every project into tasks, and then assign them to employees accordingly. This way you can observe what everyone is doing in real time, so you have a good insight into everyone’s progress. With a work day time tracker, you can see right away if someone struggles with their tasks or if a specific project needs more employees assigned to it. This way you’ll avoid possible burnout and keep them at their peak performance.

What’s more, splitting projects into tasks gives your employees a vision of the big picture. This way they know how even the smallest task fits into achieving the ultimate goal, which helps them stay motivated.

Another thing you’ll find employee time clock program useful for is to create a performance review. Employee hours tracker provides you with detailed information on employees’ performance and productivity. You can see what they’re excelling at and where there’s room for improvement.

With time and attendance software, you can pay attention to everyone’s work hours and attendance. Use this information to prevent employee burnout by making sure they don’t work more than they should. This also means using vacation days when available. You could prohibit carrying vacation days over to the next year to make sure they’ll use them.

Final Thoughts

There’s no secret to employee engagement. Get raw information with employee time tracking software, and use it to motivate them with constructive advice. Learn how to engage and empower them to be an integral part of the team and together work towards achieving the company’s goals. 

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