In every company and professional team, you can find a measurable level of employee engagement. Some companies inspire constant and enthusiastic engagement; some induce such burnout or boredom that employees inevitably disengage. Most are somewhere in between, encouraging engagement but also facing the usual challenges of maintaining a high level of motivation among their team members.
Engagement is a particular concern for businesses with remote teams, or who work almost entirely through remote employees. Remote work can be highly engaging but can also result in isolation and disengagement if employees feel disconnected from the company.
Employee engagement plays a critical role in any company. But to boost it, you must first understand the key elements of engagement and the conditions necessary to maintain long-term motivation.
What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement is at the heart of any company’s productivity and company culture. It keeps employees motivated, dedicated, and focused on doing their best. Employee engagement determines whether your team is committed to each project and mission or whether they’re just biding their time to earn a paycheck.
Of course, engagement naturally ebbs and flows in each person. Distractions at home, burnout at work, or reasons to re-engage will come and go. However, a successful company will strive to maintain and regularly boost employee engagement to encourage the greatest productivity, personal investment, and mutually uplifting company culture possible.
The Challenges That Interfere With Employee Engagement
A high level of employee engagement comes from many different elements going right. However, any number of negative conditions can get in the way of positive engagement. If any of the following challenges are in place, managers will naturally struggle to raise engagement and may even continue to see engagement drop over time.
Performance Over Experience
One of the most common mistakes in fostering employee engagement is to place performance metrics above the employee experience. While it’s true that people do not go to work to have fun, pushing employees too hard and constantly asking them to give more without stopping to consider their capacity or stress levels will inevitably lead to burnout – a critical state of disengagement.
Managers should focus on optimizing performance, not just pushing productivity numbers up higher than they were at the last assessment.
Employee Health and Wellness
Even the most engaged employees will have trouble staying motivated if their personal needs are not met. Poor health, financial troubles, or challenges at home will lead to distraction. This is why many workplaces provide health and wellness – including financial wellness – resources for their staff. It is also important to be compassionate when employees go through difficult personal events. An empathic and patient leader will likely see renewed engagement as the trouble subsides, while a callous leader may see a troubled employee completely disengage.
Disengaged or Hostile Management
Employees also are less likely to engage when their leadership is not engaged. Absentee, unavailable, micro-managing, and hostile managers all lead to reduced employee engagement and contribute to a higher turnover rate.
Dead-End Career Paths
Employees want to grow. They want to get raises and promotions, see their career progress, and earn access to more interesting work. If there is limited internal promotion or professional development, employees will disengage to seek their next career step elsewhere.
Understaffing or Unrealistic Assignments
A perpetually understaffed or overworked team will also have lower engagement levels than a well-managed team. Understaffing puts more work than intended on the remaining team members while unrealistic assignments generate frustration rather than enthusiasm and loyalty in employees.
Inaccurate or Inconsequential Engagement Metrics
Lastly, many businesses try to improve engagement but have the opposite effect. Taking constant pulse surveys without making changes will make employees feel invisible and pestered at the same time. Vague and directed surveys can also artificially boost apparent engagement without measuring actual engagement levels or indicating when/if progress has been made.
Whose Job Is It to Strengthen Employee Engagement?
The responsibility of employee engagement lies with management, from direct team leaders to department heads and C-suite executives. Employees need to see their leaders pulling just as hard as they are. Leaders must also aptly manage workloads with a combination of competence and compassion that inspires their teams to do their best work.
Leadership is responsible for creating an environment, company culture, and work assignment system that keeps employees engaged. Managers should encourage engagement, provide growth opportunities, and show compassion for struggles to take responsibility for the overall engagement of their team.
Tips to Strengthen Employee Engagement
How can you strengthen employee engagement in your company? Several tactics work well and will build a foundation of high engagement as part of your growing company culture.
Lead by Example
Managers and upper-level leaders should remain engaged. They should show up, participate in meetings, do their share of project work, and embody the company values. Employees are more likely to engage when managers can represent a positive engagement example.
Intuitively Balance Workloads and Assignments
Make sure employees are not overloaded or at risk of burnout. A good manager can assign just the right amount of work to each employee to keep them interested and challenged, but not build up excess stress.
Show Compassion When Employees Face Hardship
Employees may go through personal matters that can cause a dip in engagement and performance. Compassionate leadership through patience and support can help rekindle employee engagement when a personal challenge or tragedy has passed. Other employees may also feel more engaged knowing that their employer is kind, and would be understanding if they faced hardship in the future.
Provide Opportunities to Be Challenged and Learn
Engagement is also about maintaining an employee’s interest in their work. To do this, provide opportunities for employees to challenge themselves and then learn and grow from the experience. A higher-level project, cross-training with another team, or mentoring with an engineer are all good examples of how to keep the work lively and interesting.
Create an Internal Path for Promotion and Professional Development
Internal career development is also essential. Provide employees a chance to build their professional skills through additional training. Also, ensure there are opportunities for internal promotions from any position based on merit and skill.
Creating an Engaging Company Culture for Remote Employees
Any company can build its culture to foster engagement. Applying the same principles to your remote work management style can help boost engagement throughout your remote teams. For more information about a positive remote company culture, contact us today.
