6 Employee Engagement Ideas to Boost Your Employer Brand

Employee engagement has a huge impact on so many areas of your business. From the reputation your company gains as a place of work to the amount of innovation your employees bring to their roles, the benefits of employee engagement are widespread.

Our work in recruitment has shown us that high employee engagement rates are essential to retaining the most talented candidates and creating a better onboarding experience for new hires, both of which are key to stable business growth. In this article, we share six of the most impactful employee engagement initiatives to help boost your employer brand and explain the impact that these ideas for employee engagement could have on your business.

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement refers to how involved, enthusiastic and emotionally connected employees are to their role and place of work. It’s a metric that is often used to measure company culture, productivity and enjoyment.

Employees who feel engaged at work are committed to the work they do and genuinely invested in the outcome of their projects. They feel focused on their tasks, enjoy being at work and work efficiently, as well as feel a positive affinity with their employer. 

Why Is Employee Engagement Important?

Perhaps the main reason relating to the importance of employee engagement is that it can have a positive impact on performance. Research from CIPD has found that this relationship is reciprocal, but multiple pieces of evidence show engaged employees perform better at work than their unengaged peers.

Digging deeper into this, research from IES found that employees who are engaged are more willing to go beyond the basic demands of their role and also to engage with relevant learning and development opportunities outside of work. So not only are engaged teams better at their jobs, but they’re also more likely to be innovative and proactive, which gives your company a competitive edge in your industry. 

A report from The Engagement Institute found that employees who are disengaged at work cost U.S. companies up to $550 billion a year. When your team isn’t engaged they’re a lot less focused and productive, decreasing your business output and ending up costing you money that more engaged employees would be making.

From a recruitment perspective, more engaged employees are likely to stay in their roles for longer, increasing retention rates and reducing the money that needs to be spent on hiring and training new employees more regularly. Having high employee retention is a benefit in itself, but it also contributes to greater workplace stability and a better reputation as an employer, the latter of which makes future recruitment efforts easier.

How to Measure Employee Engagement

Measuring employee engagement is necessary when you’re working towards improving it, but it’s not a straightforward metric that can be easily measured with one type of survey. Instead, you’ll need to decide what employee engagement looks like in your business and then decide on the best way to measure this.

Many organisations use productivity and focus as a measure of engagement, which you can record by looking at the amount of time that employees are taking to complete a task or the output they’re producing over a period of time. Another good gauge of engagement is how much employees are interacting at work, which you can measure by looking at the number of internal emails or messages that are sent. 

Engagement looks at how connected your employees feel to your business, so another way to measure engagement is by looking at retention rates. It’s also worth looking at more qualitative research to understand your teams’ feelings towards your company, which you can do through internal surveys or focus groups.

There’s not a single metric that engagement is measured in, but by understanding your performance in the areas we’ve listed above, you’ll get a much better idea of how engaged your staff are.

How to Increase Employee Engagement in the Workplace

Increasing employee engagement in the workplace has a variety of different benefits for your business, both from a performance perspective and when it comes to your recruitment efforts. Below are some of the best practices for employee engagement that will help to make a difference for your company.

Focus on Company Culture

One of the first pieces of advice we’ll give to people wondering how to increase employee engagement is to look inward at your company culture. The atmosphere and interactions within your organisation have a massive impact on engagement, so an important place to start is evaluating your existing culture.

Consider the elements of your culture that lend themselves to better employee engagement in the workplace; do you encourage employees to relax and socialise as well as have periods of focus throughout the day? Is it simple for employees to recognise each other’s hard work? Does your company use systems and processes that make it easy to understand tasks and objectives?

Changing your workplace culture can be one of the big drivers of employee engagement, especially when you create a culture that prioritises productivity and enjoyment at work. Here’s another one of our articles on company culture, if you’d like to read more about how this can impact your organisation and your recruitment efforts.

Provide Development Support

Another good aspect of an employee engagement strategy is to ensure you’re providing support and resources for employees to develop and upskill at work. This is important for two reasons.

The first is that, when your employees have the required skills and experience to do their jobs to a high standard, they’re a lot more productive. In the same way that engaged employees tend to be more productive, employees who are working productively and finding a flow state with their work will feel more engaged, improving employee engagement at work overall.

The second reason to use development opportunities and resources for increasing employee engagement is that it helps your employees feel more supported in their career progression and grateful to your company for this help. Not only will this increase the likelihood of them staying in your organisation for longer, as they don’t need to change jobs to upskill, but it also creates a more positive culture of learning and improvement, which contributes to a greater sense of engagement.

Integrate Work with Company Values

Levels of employee engagement are linked to how connected employees feel to your organisation, its mission and its values. A great method to increase this sense of connection is to clearly explain how the work you’re doing plays a part in wider business goals or company values, so that employees feel more accomplished and like they’re making an impact.

Ensure that all of your projects are aligned with your overarching purpose and objectives and make this clear to employees at the start of their work. Depending on the service or product your company offers this might not always be straightforward, so also think about how you can connect certain workplace tasks and behaviours to your values so that employees still feel like they’re contributing.

Give Employees Decision-Making Power

Engaged employees feel like they are a valued part of the business, and one of the most effective ways to improve employee engagement with this is to give them more decision-making power. The extent to which you can do this will depend on your business, but it’s a brilliant way to help teams feel more important and like they’re making a difference at work.

Having a good feedback culture plays an important part in this employee engagement strategy, as you want your teams to feel like they can offer suggestions or improvements that are going to make your business better. But you can take this a step further by creating forums and discussions where you ask employees for ideas of changes you could make to improve the business and encourage all kinds of suggestions.

This might take a while to get off the ground to begin with, but as employees grow more confident you’ll start to see the impact of this approach to improving employee engagement. You can help with this by ensuring that you actually take suggestions on board and make changes that your employees want, and then draw attention to these changes to encourage more involvement from the wider team.

Recognise All Kinds of Success

Feeling successful and appreciated for the work you do is another key contributor to levels of employee engagement. If you’re looking for ways to increase engagement at work then you should make sure you have an effective recognition and reward system in place which identifies the effort that all employees are putting in.

It’s easy for certain kinds of success to hog the limelight in the workplace; employees who meet project deadlines, make big sales or suggest an idea which has a positive impact. But if you only reward these kinds of success then you’re potentially excluding a large proportion of your workforce whose roles might not give them the opportunity to excel in this way.

For this reason, you need a recognition system that notices all kinds of success, whether it’s big or small or has an impact on a personal or company-wide level. Encourage your employees to highlight their own achievements or the achievements of their colleagues, and get managers to also dedicate time to celebrating these wins to help employees feel more recognised.

This can be a very effective idea for employee engagement. It helps your team to feel more positively towards you as an employer, as well as helping them feel more engaged with their work because they know they will be rewarded for positive performance.

Encourage Ambassadorship

An ambassador of employee engagement is someone who actively demonstrates their engagement at work to inspire others to do the same and feeds back about engagement levels to help improve them. Behaviour at work has a big impact on increasing employee engagement, and by encouraging ambassadorship you can help to set a precedent for engagement at work by encouraging employees to copy the actions of others.

You need ambassadors at every level if you’re implementing employee engagement strategies, so don’t just recruit more senior staff to help push your initiatives. Make it clear how your employees can be engagement ambassadors and then reward those who step forward, which should encourage more and more people to do the same.

The great thing about employee engagement is that it genuinely improves people’s experiences of work, so once they’ve started to feel more engaged they’ll want to continue. But to get this off the ground and start to increase employee engagement in the first place you need people who will implement changes and report back, which is why ambassadorship can be so useful.

Summary

Employee engagement links to employer brand because the experience your employees have in your company impacts the reputation you gain as a place to work. When your staff are engaged they have a better time at work and are more likely to speak positively about your company as an employer, which in turn can increase candidate attraction. There are countless other benefits, as we’ve already discussed, but this impact on recruitment is certainly not to be overlooked.

If you’re looking for help developing your employer brand through employee engagement, The Marketists are recruitment specialists who can help. Find out more about our employee engagement services or get in touch to speak to our team about how we can help.