How to Improve your Employee Engagement
Engaging the best talent is as tough as it’s ever been. But a smart Voice of the Employee program gives you a powerful tool not only to retain the best employees but to systematically attract them.
Voice of the Employee (VoE) solutions make it possible to collect, manage and act on employee feedback – feedback that encompasses job satisfaction, ideas for new programs and products, and suggestions for improvement. VoE measures motivation, employee involvement, and productivity. And all these things impact engagement.
Happy employees lead directly to more satisfied, loyal customers – which of course leads to increased revenue. And happy, engaged employees means lower turnover rates, and higher product and service quality.
According to a survey from CareerBuilder, 59% of workers are generally satisfied at work, but 21% plan to change jobs this year or next. So how can you use a VoE solution to retain top talent and attract new talent?
Discover What’s Working… and What’s Not
With VoE survey results in hand, you can quickly discover what’s working and what’s not. You can also track improvements and declines over time. Creating a great work environment is step one in attracting the best talent.
Employees often know more about what’s working and what’s not than their managers do. So gathering employee feedback through a VoE survey gives managers actionable insight – especially if it’s part of a 360° approach.
With 360° feedback, you can compare an employee’s self-appraisal with the feedback from their supervisor and co-workers. Then you can identify areas where employees don’t know their own strengths and weaknesses and provide development opportunities.
VoE programs can also help you identify top performing employees and reward them. This creates a better team environment in addition to improving engagement.
Perception Is Everything
Gathering employee feedback and analyzing it regularly can help organizations improve their employer brand. Better brands attract better talent.
Use VoE surveys to understand how your organization is perceived internally, and not simply to track the opinions of employees, but to understand their insight. This will help you keep your best talent engaged. But also, because employees talk to friends and family about their experiences at work, getting this feedback will keep you in touch with how your organization – and your company – is perceived externally as well.
Keeping existing talent happy and engaged will create a better environment to attract more top talent. Career development discussions are a big part of this. A 2014 Towers Watson study found that even top-ranking employees are concerned about job security. And job security ranks among the top reasons to join or leave an organization. Career development discussions can alleviate some of that fear – but only 33% of employers say managers are effective at conducting career development discussions as part of the performance management process.
Performance feedback is also an area where managers can make a direct impact on the health of an organization. These discussions help employees see how they are valued, and it gives managers an opportunity to reward employee efforts and contributions. This can go a long way in providing employees a sense of security in their jobs.
Finally, VoE surveys are a great opportunity to gather ideas from the people who are most familiar with your company’s processes, products, customers and teams. Not only does this give you unique insight, but making employees feel heard can go a long way to creating a better workplace experience.
Attracting top talent starts with engaging the top talent you already have. Start by investing in a robust Voice of the Employee solution. Let your employees be heard and they’ll spread the word.
If any of these VoE-driven talent retention tactics have worked for you, or you have any questions or comments, meet us over on LinkedIn to tell us about it. We’d love to hear from you!
To see for yourself how our enterprise feedback platform can improve your workplace culture and employee experience, sign up for a Questback.
Guide for high employee engagement
Find the 4 driving forces of engagement split up into 33 solid methods that you can use to be a better leader and raise your team’s performance.