Do you ever wonder what the magic ingredient is for a winning team? It’s their engagement, motivation, and commitment to each other and the team’s goals.
It sounds so simple. However, in reality, it takes tremendous time and energy to build a motivated and engaged team, but the incremental benefits are vital to the success of your organization in the long run. Engaged employees make the difference between a company that’s just getting along and one that’s built to excel.
So, how do you make your office retain those fun pizza parties yet reach the emotional core of your workforce? The key lies in the factors that affect employee engagement and motivation. Let’s dive right in!
What Is Employee Engagement And Motivation?
According to Gallup, the definition of employee engagement is the enthusiasm and involvement of employees in their workplace and their work.
Simply put, engaged employees care about their company and work. They’re not coming to the office just for a promotion or the paycheck, but to work on behalf of the company’s goals. They go out of their way to succeed in their role without a push.
Top 7 Factors That Affect Employee Engagement And Motivation
Employees seek more than a salary or a fleeting warm-fuzzy feeling, even though this helps them respond positively on employee engagement surveys, they need more to invest in their work and help achieve organizational goals.
So what are the employee engagement factors, and how can you boost your staff’s engagement levels and drive to succeed?
1. Hiring the right people
Let's begin with the initial journey of an employee - recruitment.
This is not to unnerve you but, the average cost of a bad hire is approximately over INR 15 lakhs. To add to this, within 6 months, more than half of the employees leave their job if they feel they don’t fit in with the firm.
With this in mind, organizations nowadays are screening applicants using realistic scenarios. This helps prospective candidates understand the job better and recruiters of their performance.
When hiring, it’s best to look beyond mere technical skills and knowledge so you have a source of involved and engaged employees.
But how do you pick from a pool of qualified candidates and determine who will outshine others? Here’s where pre-employment skills assessments come to your aid. Such tools are best used before you review cover letters and resumes.
They help you assess a candidate based on hard skills (whether a project manager is good at benchmarking or a programmer knows Python) as well as soft skills (language proficiency, situational judgment, cognitive ability, problem-solving, etc.).
The above parameters help gauge prospective employees' values, personality, and culture fit to help you conclude if they’re a culture add.
2. Company culture
Sure, a table tennis setup or plenty of board games in the break room add to the employee experience, but they don’t bring your company any closer to the central mission or help with building culture.
Of course, as mentioned before, you need to hire the right candidate who aligns with your company culture. Along with aligning, they need to interpret what that culture is. If not, you’ve got aimless individuals by your side who are unaware of the greater mission and lack the appetite to accomplish it.
Research shows that culture is the single most important factor in organizational success or failure
A work environment that possesses organizational culture is driven by clear expectations and purpose. This gives employees a cause to rally behind and do so passionately.
They are intrinsically motivated and inspired to be more engaged in their work and role, their interactions with team members, and with the organization. This enhances their work experience and engagement, which propels productivity. It instantly creates an atmosphere of positivity that’s hard to ignore.
Building Great Culture
Learn the best practices to build a prospering culture in your organization.
3. Employee participation
If you view your employees as thoughtless drones or cogs in a wheel content to do repetitive tasks, you’re mistaken.
Every single one of your employees has ideas, and it’s important to encourage and motivate employees to share their thoughts. By doing so, you not only show that you value their intellectual capabilities but also get some insightful information. Ultimately, there’s no one better to give you insight than the ones who do the work for your company day in and out.
Establish a platform where your staff can easily communicate their ideas with each and every person in the company. Don’t limit this to only shop talk, you can create different groups so they can discuss social topics too.
There are a few standout benefits of employee participation:
- Increase in productivity
- Enhanced morale
- Healthier relationships
- Commitment towards the organization
- Innovative thinking
- Managing change better
- Reducing stress
- Improving communication
- Building a stronger community
4. Amazing leaders
As a company, you have the power to set values and priorities at the highest level. However, one of the key factors of employee engagement is great management. Managers or “middle management” are the ones who’re doing all the groundwork and are key drivers of employee engagement. They work with employees on a daily basis, develop strategies, and execute plans.
This is absent in several organizations. This often leads to inconsistent or ineffective leadership, which in turn has an effect on employee engagement and productivity. And this “missing link” leads to lower employee engagement.
Your managers must have the desire and motivation to assist employees to expand and reach their full potential. They must make wise decisions and, for this, they need to have comprehensive knowledge about the industry your business is in, as well as the roles they oversee.
Employees look up to managers who are smart, competent, and respectful and who aren’t in it only for their sake or their egos. This fuels both physical engagement (present with feet and hands) as well as emotional engagement (contribute wholeheartedly with heart and soul.)
On the whole, employees who trust their managers will stay with the company, have better morale, which translates to enhanced productivity, efficiency, and engagement.
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Employee engagement handbook
A playbook for modern HR leaders to boost employee engagement with actionable solutions.
5. Clear communication
Regular and clear communication with your workforce helps make sure everyone understands the goals and objectives of the business, as well as their role in achieving them.
Of course, it’s possible to achieve! Effective communication is like a recipe, and just like any other recipe, you need an array of ingredients. That’s because each and every company is different, but the ingredients below are necessities that will need to be in the mix every time.
- Accountability, measurement, transparency, and clarity
- Direction, purpose, goals
- Connection and passion
- Honesty and openness with an authentic tone
- Consistent and clear message with the appropriate level of information
No doubt, they’re very obvious and straightforward ingredients. But when you are good at communicating, practice active listening, define actionable goals, break down processes into digestible steps, and pay attention to the progress of employees, it’s one of the motivation factors that helps improve poor performance.
6. Frequent recognition
Among all the 5 employee engagement factors we’ve talked about until now, employee recognition is perhaps one of the key factors of employee engagement and its success.
Without the work employees do every day, your organization couldn’t exist. Make sure you express this! More than peers, leaders and managers must give frequent recognition to employees, it’s a powerful form of reinforcement.
75% of employees recognized once a month by management reported high levels of job satisfaction whereas, weekly recognition leaves 85% of the employees satisfied.
Conversely, only 46% of employees feel ‘moderately’ valued by supervisors and 30% feel ‘not at all’ or ‘not very’ valued by supervisors.
Remember, a little recognition goes a long way! Even the smallest praise wants people to work harder. This will help solve countless paint points your organization faces, like poor company culture, low morale, high turnover, etc.
From now, make recognition a leading priority regularly. It’s one of the factors affecting employee engagement that you can fix!
7. Employee health
Are you wondering why employee health is seen as one of the employee engagement factors?
Believe it or not, they’re interlinked. On a given day, you spend around 10 hours in your regular job, sometimes more - it’s an active time of the day.
If the energy is not satisfied with momentum, no work is done. Akin to how if calories are not burned every day, they accumulate as fat in the body.
Work does not come in the way of a healthy employee who’s engaged. If their health is good, they work better, if their work is better, they’re healthier and happier. Similarly, if someone is unhealthy or unsatisfied, it reflects in their work and it suffers.
When we speak of how an employee feels, it’s not just physical but also mental. Mentally, do they feel healthy? Are they satisfied with their health? Do they feel the workplace is conducive to a healthy lifestyle? When you get answers to such questions, you can see actually how your employees are doing.
With this data in hand, you can work on improving your organization’s health and wellness goals so it positively affects employee experience.
One such quick action you can take to see instant results is signing up for group health insurance plans for your employees. A comprehensive corporate health plan comes with numerous benefits. Whether it’s primary care, OPD visits, pre and post hospitalization expenses, daycare procedures, and more.
Read more: What Is Comprehensive Health Insurance and Its Benefits
Besides physical cover for your employees in the form of group mediclaim, the right health benefits partner will also look into the wellness of employees. With sessions on mental health, nutrition, fitness, sleep, and more, it takes care of all aspects other than physical.
You know your employees are in good hands, both physically and mentally.
Further partners like loop also give you additional benefits for free. With an in-house team of medical staff, from virtual consults with specialists to dedicated medical advisors to help with your healthcare journey, you have support all the time, anytime! Speaking of support, for any other queries, you can contact the
24X7 customer support helpline. Similarly, you also get 24X7 claims support for claim-related queries.
Meaningful Engagement For Better Outcomes
Remember, whether it’s motivation factors, engagement levels, or company culture, there’s no quick fix. It takes blood, sweat, and tears, or in this case, time, effort, and money to improve employee engagement and build high-performing teams.
By implementing the employee engagement factors mentioned in this article, you’ll be well on your way to having happier, more driven employees who feel motivated.
When you need a little assistance, you can always write to loop. We’ll help not only with factors contributing to employee engagement but with other aspects too!
