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How Stability Enhances Engagement

Companies strive for engaged employees since they are the most productive. A firm with robust employee engagement, for example, grows revenue at 2.5 times the rate of firms with anemic engagement. However, just slightly more than one-third of workers in the U.S. feel engaged. While that figure is higher than global numbers, which stand at only 13 percent, it’s still not an impressive number.

It’s not that business leadership doesn’t see engagement as necessary; 85 percent do view engagement as important, but they may not know the best methods to achieve a good level of engagement.

They may also conflate it with other measures. High salaries and benefits, for example, tend to foster job satisfaction and loyalty. However, research indicates that it doesn’t do a lot for engagement itself.

Here are three methods to enhance engagement on the job.

  1. Build a culture of trust

Job stability is often overlooked as a method to foster engagement. Job stability is a key component in an overall culture of trust, according to business analyst Maria Gottschalk. Employees need to have a sense of safety. They need clear and open communication about company goals and their place in them. They need adequate resources to do their jobs. They need to feel that the team and work culture they operate in is free of blame and open to input.

Appropriate tools to get the work done can enhance engagement.

2. Make sure they have appropriate tools

Do your employees have the tools required to succeed on the job? According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 report, employees who don’t have an infrastructure that enables them are at risk of lower employee engagement. This seems so basic that upper management can overlook it as part of the engagement business strategy, but it’s key.

Appropriate tools can refer to functional software, bureaucratic processes, or company capabilities.

3. Individualize your employee’s goals

It’s important to know your employee’s goals to foster engagement. If they want to move in a particular direction in terms of promotion, encouraging those goals can do a lot to make employees feel engaged.

It’s also important to realize that one size does not fit all. Workplaces are increasingly diverse in terms of age cohorts, genders, family expectations, and more. Use an individualized approach.

4. Train, coach, and mentor

Nothing emphasizes a commitment to employees like training, coaching, and mentoring them to achieve their goals. Commitment exhibited is often returned as a commitment to the company in the form of engagement.

One helpful form of mentoring can be shadowing people in other departments or even cross-training so that people work in departments other than their own occasionally. Workers can gain a sense of the purpose and culture of the company as a whole, and it may give them insight into promotional paths they hadn’t previously considered.

Driving continuous development has to be a company-wide task. Companies can bring in people to train on the job or to educate employees about a particular field. They can offer online classes so employees can train at their convenience.