There are lots of variables that play important roles in the success of your business. Many of these are well-known, like market forces or the value of your offering. However, one factor many leaders often overlook is professional engagement. You may already know that high levels of it bring many benefits for companies. But, you’re likely unaware of employee engagement best practices that can have an even greater impact on your firm.

This article is going to explore exactly this—several best practices for improving employee engagement in your team with little effort.

Why Employee Engagement Best Practices Matter for Your Business

Before we explore our main topic, let’s briefly cover why best practices for employee engagement matter in the first place. There are lots of reasons why leaders strive to improve professional engagement rates. But, the most important ones are increased productivity and enhanced retention.

A high professional engagement rate means that your team members are going to be completing their tasks with more commitment. This will make them more eager to perform their best at all times—increasing their productivity. Engaged staff are also more likely to produce higher-quality work than average, which is closely tied to productivity.

As your staff get more involved in their work, they’ll be less likely to seek for new opportunities. They’ll be satisfied with their positions, increasing your company’s retention rates. If you’re not aware, a low retention rate brings with it lots of disadvantages—like increased costs and stress. High retention will allow your business to save resources and operate more efficiently in the long term.

11 Employee Engagement Best Practices

Let’s now dive into our main topic and explore employee engagement best practices that you can take advantage of in your team. We’ll be covering the following tips and strategies:

• Foster a Culture that Values Feedback
• Set Clear Goals and Expectations
• Offer Good Employee Benefits
• Provide Your Staff with Opportunities to Learn and Grow
• Recognize and Reward Your Team’s Efforts
• Ensure a Healthy Work-Life Balance
• Provide a High Level of Flexibility
• Encourage Collaboration
• Take Advantage of Team Building
• Measure Engagement Periodically
• Invest in a High-Quality Productivity Tool

It’s time to explore each in-depth, starting with the first one.

Foster a Culture that Values Feedback

The first employee engagement best practice we’ll cover is one that’s important for more than just professional commitment. Fostering a company culture that values feedback, especially in terms of receiving it, will give your team lots of advantages. However, giving feedback can be even more valuable—especially when aimed at your management team.

If staff have any concerns about tasks or want to suggest new ideas, managers need to be open to receiving them. If your team feel that their voices aren’t heard, they’ll think that their roles are meaningless in your firm. A sense of purpose is a key factor in employee engagement, so you should avoid diminishing it for any reason. Additionally, your leadership team should always be open to feedback as it’s vital for innovation and growth.

Set Clear Goals and Expectations

Setting clear goals and expectations is another thing that’s more than just an employee engagement best practice. By ensuring your company’s goals are clear and accessible, your staff can be more aligned with them. This is especially important in the long term, as people are prone to forgetting important details if they’re not reminded for a long while.

Besides long-term goals, you should also ensure the clarity of shorter-term ones. You can do this by managing all of your company’s tasks in one place. A great example of this is a high-quality time tracker with built-in task management functionality—like WebWork. This will let your team stay organized and informed of what’s being worked on now and what they will need to do in the future.

Offer Good Employee Benefits

Employee benefits are an often forgotten topic in the world of business. However, they can play an important role in ensuring your staff feel appreciated for their work. Some of the most common benefits include items that cost money—like insurance or a gym membership. But others are completely free and may even offer a better value to your staff. A popular example of this is flexible working schedules, which we’ll explore more in-depth later on in this guide.

When taking advantage of this employee engagement best practice, make sure to consider each of your staff’s preferences. While this will require more work, offering custom-tailored benefits will get you the best results possible.

Provide Your Staff with Opportunities to Learn and Grow

Closely tied to our last point of discussion, learning opportunities are often considered a sought-after workplace benefit. While their positives for your employees are obvious, your business stands to gain a lot as well. By continuously learning and expanding their skills, your staff will produce work that’s of an ever-improving quality. They’ll also be able to take on more challenges as they develop professionally. This can be especially helpful when expanding your team—more knowledgeable staff will have an easier time training new members.

Recognize and Reward Your Team’s Efforts

As recognition is a key part of professional engagement, this best practice is quite an obvious one. But, besides just awarding your team’s achievements, award their efforts as well. If your staff try something ambitious and it doesn’t work, you should still reward them for trying. Of course, this should be a smaller award. However, it can have a measurable impact on your team’s morale—especially right after a failure.

Another key thing to consider when recognizing efforts and achievements is to do so proportionally. Many leaders make the mistake of rewarding significant growth in their businesses with nothing more than a celebration party. An inadequate reward like this can make your staff feel that their efforts were meaningless. So, make sure to prepare big rewards for big achievements.

Ensure a Healthy Work-Life Balance

While work is important for your staff to achieve success, their personal lives matter a lot as well. Sacrificing personal responsibilities for work leads to lots of problems in the long term. Chief among these is burnout, which has the polar opposite effects of high employee engagement. If your staff experience work overload, you should address the issue as quickly as you can to avoid burning them out.

There are lots of ways to ensure your staff have a healthy work-life balance. A great example of this is to make sure no single employee or team within your company is overloaded with assignments. Another one is to provide your team with a high level of flexibility—which is conveniently the next employee engagement best practice we’re going to explore.

Provide a High Level of Flexibility

Flexible working schedules are among the most in-demand workplace benefits across the globe. They’ll allow your staff to complete both personal and work tasks more effectively. Your team will be able to work when they’re most productive—early in the morning, late in the evening, or somewhere in between. They will then be able to spend time outside of their peak productivity hours on personal tasks—boosting their work satisfaction and engagement levels.

Encourage Collaboration

Collaboration is important in lots of ways for your business. The one we’re interested in for this article of course relates to your team’s professional engagement. Working together closely is key to establishing strong ties between your employees. Collaboration will also help your team balance their workloads better—avoiding stressful situations.

Besides being an employee engagement best practice, strong collaboration will also help your team create higher-quality work. Your staff will be able to catch more errors in time and fix them.

Take Advantage of Team Building

Closely tied to the topic of collaboration, team building is another excellent best practice for employee engagement. By building strong bonds between your staff, you’ll be able to establish a company culture that’ll attract and retain your talent. If you can make your workplace feel like a second family for your staff—without overworking them—you’ll get great results in the long run.

Some great ways to take advantage of this employee engagement best practice include corporate dinners, parties, and other gatherings. The key element in all of these is to do something that’s not related to work with your team. This way, your staff will get to know each other better.

Measure Engagement Periodically

Long-term goals like maintaining high employee engagement require periodic reviews to be achievable. You should check what effects the employee engagement best practices you use have on your team. If you see that they’re working as intended, then you can continue taking advantage of them. However, if you don’t notice any progress or even spot decreased professional engagement—you should revise your strategies.

It’s important to go through this process frequently. As your team changes over time, the effectiveness of various employee engagement best practices will vary as well. When you notice a strategy is no longer delivering good results, you should revise or replace it with something more suited to your use case.

Invest in a High-Quality Productivity Tool

The last employee engagement best practice we’ll cover relates to productivity suites. Feature-rich apps like WebWork can allow you to track lots of key performance metrics in your team—including professional engagement. The reason why we’re covering this last is because such apps can help you with all of the best practices mentioned above. They can allow you to find the best strategies for your specific use case—ensuring a perfect fit for your team. Productivity apps like time trackers will also enable you to verify that your chosen strategies help your team in measurable ways.

Concluding Thoughts

Employee engagement is an important concept for all businesses. High levels of it will help your company grow with dedicated employees who are committed to their jobs. Your staff will also stay with your team for longer, allowing you to save on recruitment costs in the long term.

The employee engagement best practices we covered in this guide make it simple to take advantage of these benefits. They are easy to implement and fit a wide variety of teams. Start using these best practices in your team and speed up the growth of your business today.