5 Ways Employee Engagement Impacts Continuous Improvement Culture

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Companies lose up to $550 billion due to disengaged employees.
What does this mean?
Prioritizing employee engagement isn’t optional.
But how do you achieve that?
In this article, you’re going to learn five practical ways to improve employee engagement.

What is Employee Engagement?

What is the meaning of employee engagement?
Employee engagement is the extent to which employees invest their mental and emotional energies to achieve the goals of an organization.

Engaged employees are enthusiastic and committed to their work and workplace.

Employee engagement can help you determine whether your employees are putting in their time and effort to achieve company goals.

In fact, employees who feel valued and connected to their organization perform better, stay longer, can motivate others, and also improve the performance of their teams.

It’s worth noting that employee engagement affects crucial aspects of your company from revenue to customer experience as well as profitability and more.

Statistics suggest that employees who feel engaged are 4.6 times more likely to feel motivated to perform better.

And that’s not all, companies with highly engaged employees generate a profit of 23% more than their competitors and have a less absenteeism rate of 81%.

From these stats, it’s safe to say that improving employee engagement can greatly benefit a company/organization in many ways:

However, the challenge is how to keep employees engaged.

This takes us to the next section:

How To Improve Employee Engagement and Achieve Continuous Improvement Culture

Follow these five useful ways to boost employee engagement.

1. Give Your Employees a Listening Ear

Employees who feel their input to the organization are valued are more likely to work harder and encourage other staff to do the same.
The good thing is that listening to employee input isn’t as hard as you might think. You can do it by having a suggestion box placed at strategic locations within the company precincts. Doing this will show employees that their input is valued. You also need to work on the suggestions given by employees even if not all of them.

2. Encourage Transparency

While it’s advisable to allow teams the freedom to choose, decide, and change how they undertake day-to-day company roles and duties, it’s vital to encourage employees to be transparent in the way they work.

This is especially important when it comes to documenting the decisions that affect the organization. This makes teams in sync with the company’s day-to-day operations and procedures.

3. Enable Collaboration

A company can innovate when its employees are free to share ideas across departments. The risks involved in preventing teams to share ideas outside of their department can be detrimental to your company's growth.

In fact, if teams don’t share ideas, a simple update can make employees clash with other teams outside of their departments or bring a lot of confusion.

That means that if a change was to save your business from making losses, it will even achieve the opposite.

To encourage collaboration and enable employees to share ideas with other teams outside of their departments, you should introduce tools and team collaboration software.

4. Improve The Workplace

Encouraging employee engagement isn’t only limited to how they handle their daily work.
Granted, the best way to boost your employee morale is to allow them the freedom to decide how to set up their workplaces. Allow employees to provide their input on matters of workplace improvements as well as other rules.

You also have to act on the feedback because their suggestions are based on how they think the improvement can help them increase productivity or performance.

Must mention that if employees aren’t happy with the workplace atmosphere, your customers will also be affected.

Engaged employees are more pleasant for customers to engage with and can collaborate and make meaningful decisions that can help to serve the customers better.

5. Acknowledge and Reward Improvements

Develop a culture/habit of acknowledging improvements whether small or big. As long as the suggestion given helped to improve or shape your business, it’s worth celebrating. In fact, the best way to acknowledge improvements is to highlight/mention the employee who provided the suggestion.
This will help to motivate others to also provide positive feedback whenever necessary.

FAQs

Here are a few questions you might come across when it comes to employee engagement and its impact on continuous improvement culture.

How do you engage employees in continuous improvement?

To engage employees through continuous improvement, you need to use the following tips:

●       Seek and give feedback

●       Reward improvements

●       Celebrate innovation

●       Promote a creative workplace.

●       Give employees the freedom to express their potential.

What does a culture of continuous improvement mean?

A culture of continuous improvement involves working with all parties of a company including employees, leadership, and management in determining and minimizing or preventing waste continuously.

What is the role of culture in improving employee engagement?

Company culture can greatly impact the company in many ways. For instance, it can affect profits, recruiting efforts, sales, employee self-esteem, etc. Powerful company culture can attract employees, customers, and business partners. It can improve the productivity of employees at the workplace and reduce turnover.

Author Bio:

Dennis Lodge is a freelance writer who writes about employee culture and workplace productivity. I have used him to write my essays that have enabled me to graduate successfully in my university education. He currently writes content about education, careers, digital marketing, etc.