Uncomplicate – Framing an employee engagement strategy
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
While companies put in a lot of effort to keep their customers happy and satisfied, more often than not, they do not realize that they need to keep their employees engaged and happy. After all happy employees result in happy customers. So, how can a company go about planning their employee engagement strategy? Mary Poppen, chief customer officer at Glint (acquired by LinkedIn), gives tips on how to crack it.
“Employee engagement can be measured in multiple ways, from one-on-one conversations with managers to a company-wide survey where you can capture the company’s voice,” Mary said. “What is critical is you need to be able to communicate back and articulate what you heard and then what you are going to do about it and see the progress of the action.”
According to Mary, it is critical to have an ‘employee listening’ program like a survey because it builds a “closed” loop, wherein managers and leaders can incorporate various measures based on feedback. Mary also stressed the connection between employee engagement and customer satisfaction which ultimately leads to business results.
Here are some practical measures to implement employee engagement:
- If you want to come up with a survey, you need to first think of what the drivers of employee engagement in the company are, and frame questions accordingly. Those should ideally go into the survey, so that you can gauge the response and act accordingly.
- You can implement an employee or buddy program. “(It helps because you are) putting people together to build engagement, through relationships,” Mary said.
- Implement a management training program. Managers sometimes do not know how to gauge employee engagement. Training managers on tools and resources and helping them leverage the same will go a long way.
- Make an effort to communicate to the employees. It is a low-hanging fruit. Employees need to understand how their contributions are helping the company, they need to know that the work they do is meaningful. Make it a priority to keep them informed about the larger strategy of the company and how they can help in achieving it.
- Create a culture club. Put together a cross-functional culture club of internal people who are culture champions. These are people who will identify what it takes to bring the company’s values into life. “I have seen that it works really well and gets employees engaged because it is peer-to-peer…you have champions who are peers. It helps inspire people and also get to the core values of the company,” Mary said.
