Top 10 Employee Engagement Strategies That Matter In today's competitive marketplace, businesses need to focus on making sure employees are engaged.

In 2021, employee engagement is one of the most important aspects of managing employees. Employee engagement helps you understand whether your employees are genuinely driven towards work and are motivated enough for your organization.

Why is employee engagement important?

1. Happier employees.
   Employee engagement equals happier employees. Gone are the days when employee needs were limited to higher salaries and promotions. Today, the needs of employees include flexibility at work, working remotely, and much more. Catering to these needs helps you keep your employees happy and more engaged.

2. Higher productivity
   High employee engagement is directly related to high employee productivity. When an employee is genuinely driven and motivated to work, they tend to work harder, increasing the overall productivity within your organization.

3. Improved mental health
   Sound mental health is extremely important. High employee engagement leads to the improved mental health of your employees as they feel more motivated towards working with their peers. Ultimately, sound mental health leads to higher productivity and an improved work atmosphere.

4. Reduced absenteeism
   Engaged employees are often connected with the organization's core goals and want to help the company attain the same. High employee engagement leads to lower absenteeism as employees do not want to skip a day at work and are willing to give their best every day.

5. Greater employee retention
   High employee engagement allows an organization to retain more employees. If your employees are motivated and driven for work, they are less likely to leave your company or switch jobs. Engaged employees tend to stick around.

6. High employee loyalty
   Employee loyalty is often overlooked when it comes to keeping your workforce engaged. High employee engagement often leads to employees being loyal to their organization. This implies that they will not leave the company when a better offer comes their way.

7. Improved customer relations
   When your employees are engaged, they take better care of your customers and build healthy relationships. Especially in customer-facing jobs, high employee engagement leads to improved customer relations and better customer support.

8. Higher work satisfaction
   Organizations often confuse productivity with work satisfaction. Your employees can be highly productive even if they are not satisfied. Higher employee engagement results in your employees being genuinely satisfied with their work and enjoying what they do. This, in turn, leads to high productivity at work.

Related: 7 Ways to Ignite Employee Engagement and Boost Your Bottom Line

Top 10 employee engagement strategies

Employee engagement is much more complicated than it sounds. Your organization's HR department needs to be vigilant and creative to keep employees engaged and satisfied.

Here are some of the best employee engagement strategies to help you keep employees driven.

1. Seamless employee support

It's natural for employees to hit roadblocks and look for support. The traditional employee service desks are no longer useful in resolving issues faced by employees across all departments. An organization should implement a modern service desk to provide seamless support to its employees.

A modern service desk incorporates a single-window approach that allows employees working in all departments to obtain support from a single platform. It uses conversational AI instead of support agents to provide the first level of support to the employees. This helps your employees get their issues resolved simply by chatting with AI chatbots. The chatbots understand the context of the questions and can provide personalized solutions to the same by scanning your organization's knowledge base.

Plus, your employees can get their cases routed to support agents to obtain more insights into their issues. Here, the service desk acts as a connecting link between your employees and the agents, helping the agents communicate personalized solutions to your employees.

2. Successful onboarding

How you onboard your employees can decide their fate with your company. If onboarded well, your employees will be thoroughly engaged while working in your organization.

Especially in remote employees, the HR managers need to provide them with all necessary resources as they join the organization. Based on their user persona, the managers can send personalized emails welcoming them into the organization. These emails can contain a welcome letter and details like company policies, the roles and responsibilities of the employees, contact information for your fellow team members, orientation dates, etc.

Effective onboarding helps make your employees comfortable in their new work environment, leading to higher engagement.

Related: 4 Essentials for Employee Engagement in a Remote World

3. Proper training

In 2021, an organization needs to be in tune with the latest technological advancements and trends in the industry. Your employees need this knowledge too. A modern service desk can help with training by adding resources to your knowledge base. Employees can now train themselves from any location and at any time.

When your employees become capable of training themselves, it boosts their confidence and makes them more driven towards their work.

4. Effective communication

Effective and streamlined communication is key to employee engagement. It's important to establish an organized hierarchy and structure of communication to avoid confusion and get your messages through in the best way possible. Effective communication helps your employees reach out to the management and vice versa, leading to thriving work culture and a productive environment.

5. Adopting a modern ticketing system

A manual ticketing system often results in non-technical employees feeling lost and confused. It is essential to understand that not every employee is capable of using a dedicated ticketing platform. This is likely to result in reduced employee engagement.

As a solution, you can implement a modern ticketing system that allows your employees to auto-resolve their issues. Here, the service desks create and manage support tickets for your employees, relieving them of spending time and effort doing the same. A simple chat allows your employees to create a ticket and send their case to an agent.

Modern service desks keep your employees updated on their cases via periodic notifications. Once the case is resolved, the service desk automatically closes the ticket and the case without your employees making any effort.

Such ease of operation for resolving their issues allows your employees to build healthy relations with your organization, increasing employee engagement.

6. Recognizing employee efforts

No employee likes spending the majority of their days working for you without the appreciation they deserve. To increase employee engagement, it is important to recognize the efforts put in by your employees and appreciate the same.

This does not mean rewarding your employees with money. A gesture as small as a personalized email appreciating their contribution is enough to keep your employees motivated. This makes your employees feel valued and motivates them to work harder.

7. Increasing transparency in communication

When you make your decisions more transparent, it makes your employees feel included. It is always advisable for management to share their decisions with employees and take their opinions on important matters into consideration. It increases job satisfaction and makes employees feel connected.

8. Empowering managers and team leaders

Managers and team leaders are often the single-point contacts for employees whenever they encounter issues or need training. An organization needs to empower its leaders to train and manage their subordinates well. This results in an adequate delegation of authority and higher employee engagement as the needs of your employees are taken care of in the best way possible.

9. Focusing on mental well-being

As mentioned earlier, employees need to have sound mental health to give their best while working. It is always advisable for an organization to focus on the mental well-being of its employees to increase their engagement. Managers should initiate conversations regarding mental health and be sensitive to the issues faced by their subordinates to ensure they are healthy.

Related: Now Is the Time to Start Embracing Mental Health in the Workplace

10. Respecting your employees

Finally, a company needs to treat its employees with the utmost respect and value their contributions to increase engagement. Remember that your employees will be driven to work with you only when they feel like a part of your work family.

The final word

These are some of the major tips to keep in mind for increasing employee engagement within your organization. Following these tips will help you keep your employees motivated and drive them to give their best.