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Tag: Employee Engagement

6 Simple Ways to Encourage Employee Wellness: Key Strategies and Benefits

Your employees are your main key to success. Healthy, happy employees are much more productive and can help your business thrive in competitive markets. That’s why employee wellness initiatives are so important.

Companies that value wellness have lower rates of absenteeism, too. This is particularly important if you work in a fast-paced industry where every day counts. 

Fortunately, there are a range of approaches you can adopt to further employee wellness and happiness. Choosing a wellness package that suits your business and budget is key to creating a workforce of cheerful, productive employees. 

READ: Navigating the New Era of Employee Engagement — Everything you Need to Know

Profitability and wellness

As a business leader, you may be concerned that pouring money into a health and wellness program will reduce your profitability. However, a recent study from the University of Warwickshire shows that employees who are happy work harder than those who are unsatisfied at work. 

Take advantage of the profitability-boosting potential of wellness programs by investing in everyday happiness-boosting treats like free movie tickets or food and drink during working hours. Small gestures of appreciation lead to a 37% increase in employee satisfaction at Google and may have a similar impact on your firm. 

Nutrition and hydration

Most full-time employees struggle to prepare enough healthy, nutritious food to fuel them through an entire workday. As an employer, you can help your staff by offering a range of snacks, meals, fruits and veggies at work. Providing free food is a great way to boost employee wellness and raise energy levels at work. 

Hydration is an often-overlooked element of health and well-being. However, inadequate hydration can derail staff productivity and send employee wellness into a tailspin. Unfortunately, some folks don’t enjoy drinking water and need an extra nudge to drink their fill. 

Incentivize hydration by embracing hydration hacks. Purchase funky water bottles for staff and provide flavored or sparkling water at work. Help staff set water intake goals and reward folks who can drink their fill in a day.

Mental health services

Everyone’s mental health has taken a knock in the past few years. Global conflict, pandemics and a rising cost of living are tough on employees and may send them over their “tipping” point. 

READ: Finding the Silver Lining Amidst Rising Interest and Inflation Rates

Support your staff by providing access to mental health services. Your staff will benefit greatly from free, confidential access to therapists and trained psychiatrists. Regularly review the efficacy of mental health services by surveying staff to find out about uptake, improvements in well-being, and general feedback. 

Community engagement

As much as your staff cares about the profitability of your business, they are far more likely to be healthy and happy if they feel that your business positively contributes to the local community. Community engagement opportunities are usually cost-effective, too, as local non-profits are always looking for volunteers. 

Facilitate community engagement by electing an engagement officer for your business and budgeting for initiatives. Setting aside funds for community projects shows that you truly care about the causes that bring your employees the most happiness and fulfillment.

READ: 5 Steps to Launch Work Volunteer Efforts

Workflow management

Every business has its own unique approach to workflow. However, inefficient workflow management can have a detrimental impact on staff mental health. No employee wants to spend their workday jumping through unnecessary hoops or filling out paperwork that could have been automated. 

Automate menial workflow tasks to support employee wellness. This is particularly important in fields like engineering and construction, where employees have to manually input measurements with a high degree of accuracy. 

Utilizing AI in your workflow management may reduce fatigue, too. Roles that involve data management and CRMs can become monotonous quickly and may undermine employee focus and mental well-being. Embracing an automated CRM can help staff focus on tasks that improve the business’s bottom line. 

Avoid the temptation to multitask while streamlining your workflow. Multitasking may sound more efficient, but will only result in errors and a sense of being overwhelmed. Instead, decrease the number of projects that staff is working on to reduce confusion and improve clarity amongst your staff. 

The bottom line

Your employees are the bedrock of your business. Keep them healthy and happy by investing in their wellness and supporting their interests. Set aside a portion of your profits to be reinvested in gym memberships and free, nutritious meals. Give folks the time and funds they need to volunteer in the community, too. Even small gestures like time off for fundraisers can help your employees feel proud and happy at work. 

 

Indiana Lee Bio PictureIndiana Lee is a writer, reader, and jigsaw puzzle enthusiast from the Pacific Northwest. An expert on business operations, leadership, marketing, and lifestyle, you can connect with her on LinkedIn.

You’ve Heard of ‘Quiet Quitting,’ but What About ‘Quiet Leadership?’

HR leaders may be aware of quiet quitting, but there’s one cause of quiet quitting that’s going unrecognized: quiet leadership. Among other factors, quiet leadership can cause employees to disengage and quiet quit. Unlike active managers who follow and support the day-to-day activities of their team, quiet leaders have a hands-off approach to managing their team that is driven by end results and numbers. This approach can alienate workers who desire mentorship and guidance from their managers.

To address this issue, employers should foster active leadership within organizations so leaders proactively engage with their teams. The result for employers is a more engaged workforce who want to work for the company. Three strategies to accomplish that involve training frontline managers, helping employees plan for their future and focusing on culture.

READ: 4 Ways to Offer Wellness Tools and Retain Your Workforce

Train frontline managers

Frontline managers work with teams daily, which grants them a powerful influence over their team’s level of engagement. After being promoted during the pandemic, many frontline managers also received management duties for the first time. These newly promoted frontline managers may also feel anxious about meeting their targets and focus on end results over day-to-day team management. In some cases, that can create gaps in leadership and management skills, as well as quiet leadership.

The solution for businesses is adequately training frontline managers to support their teams. When an employee is promoted to a management position, they may think they know how to manage teams, but it may not be the most effective approach once they are in the trenches. Training programs, along with mentorship from more experienced leaders can help new managers adapt successfully.

Oftentimes, something as simple as a resource library or a book on management or leadership can offer important tips to managers who may not think to seek out resources on their own. Other organizations may choose to enroll frontline managers in a mandatory leadership program or conference to enhance their leadership skills and encourage management/upper-management check-ins to help improve their leadership styles.

Help employees stay engaged

The best employees are engaged employees who feel valued, know they are appreciated and see a future within the organization. However, if managers focus exclusively on the numbers at the end of every quarter, their quiet leadership approach can leave their team feeling as though they are only recognized for their production value, not the skills they bring to the team and organization.

Time within an organization can make employees short-sighted. Employees may focus on hitting their goals within a certain timeframe while neglecting the broader goals for themselves and the business. Eventually, organizations might find themselves with a lackluster leadership pipeline as employees become disengaged or lose the desire to grow within the organization.

Leaders and frontline managers, in particular, can avoid quiet leadership and lead proactively by helping employees plan. Check-ins and annual reviews both present opportunities to talk with employees individually, but group sessions can also be a helpful tool to overview various career paths within the organization. By encouraging a forward-thinking mentality, leadership can keep employees motivated to succeed individually and as a team.

Remember the importance of culture

Quiet leadership and corporate culture go hand in hand. When leaders focus exclusively on results, culture often suffers as a result. The impacts of a stressful or unsupportive culture may not become immediately apparent in the numbers, but if culture is left unattended for long enough, burnout, poor employee retention and low morale will lower productivity.

Leaders need to ask themselves whether they are focusing on numbers at the expense of their people. If they see signs of quiet leadership, like employees who feel excessively stressed about meeting their targets at work and who leave after one to two years on the job, that is typically a sign to shift leadership styles. 

In contrast to a culture where quiet leadership is common, a culture with proactive leadership will encourage employees to tackle new challenges, take appropriate time off and be transparent with managers regarding career support. Employees will appreciate and benefit from regular check-ins and consistent opportunities for growth. 

Quiet leadership is as much of a challenge as quiet quitting since both highlight management and culture challenges. Fortunately, leaders can confront this obstacle with ease by training managers appropriately, guiding employees and centering a strong corporate culture.

 

Niki JorgensenNiki Jorgensen is a director of service operations with Insperity, a leading provider of human resources offering the most comprehensive suite of scalable HR solutions available in the marketplace. For more information about Insperity, call 800-465-3800 or visit www.insperity.com.  

Navigating the New Era of Employee Engagement — Everything You Need to Know

Employee engagement is always important to keep a business running smoothly and successfully. In the time of The Great Resignation and “quiet quitting,” leaders must get creative. More attention must be paid to employee needs from pay to overall quality of life.

READ: 6 Ways to Find New Employees During the “Great Resignation”

Workplace health

Your job can impact your mental health and physical well-being. Employees are increasingly taking notice of how they feel at a job and factoring burnout and lack of support into their decisions to work elsewhere. The health of employees is vital from an ethical standpoint but also in order to preserve efficiency and productivity. If your staff is hurting, physically or emotionally, so will your bottom line.

Employee burnout results from putting too much pressure on employees and not providing enough engaging activities. Leaders should focus on integrating staff into the workplace culture and putting their health first. Productivity will follow inherently. For example, Colorado tech company, SumUp, emphasizes team events and has seen a shift in overall business success from doing so.

More employees work from home now than ever. In fact, Denver has the 12th largest remote workforce in the nation, when considering cities with 300,000 people or more. The number of people who work from home in Colorado jumped from 9% to 24% remote employees from 2019 to 2021. This is a massive change, and leaders should be aware of how this impacts employee health and engagement. 

For instance, working from home can exacerbate chronic pain from spending long hours at less-than-comfortable desks. Providing ergonomic home office accessories can help your employees live a healthier lifestyle while still being able to work remotely. This could include standing desks, ergonomic office chairs, or even blue light glasses that prevent eye strain. 

READ: Managing a Remote Work Team with Communication and Ease

Along the same vein, team events may need to be remote, but they should be plentiful, optional and engaging. Employees should want to come to work every day. Otherwise, they simply won’t — whether that’s physically or mentally.

Increased flexibility and transparency

When it’s tougher to get employees to “show up,” leaders have a responsibility to incentivize them to do so. Put your focus on the quality of life at work to inspire confidence in your company and workforce. One of the best ways to increase employee satisfaction and engagement is to trust them — and to encourage them to trust you.

Giving employees the autonomy to choose when and how they work can do wonders for your engagement rate. Adopt a more flexible schedule and don’t micromanage employees by tracking their every keystroke. You’ll be surprised how a little wiggle room encourages them to work more often and efficiently. And when they do, recognize their efforts companywide. 

Perhaps more importantly, treat employees as part of the team. This may seem obvious, but people value transparency in the workplace. Rather than being blindsided by layoffs or company policy changes, keep your workforce in the loop as much as possible. Some things are on a need-to-know basis, but be as transparent as you can as quickly as you can, and employees will respond positively.

Fair wages and benefits

This new wave of employees also expects to be rewarded fairly for their hard work. Only 32% of the current workforce believe their pay is fair. You can stand out from the competition by adhering to these expectations.

Pay staff as much as you can, because they are likely to shop around for a better offer somewhere else if they feel under-compensated. The internet has provided job seekers — and current employees — the opportunity to see how other employees are being paid within their industry. Make sure to offer as much as you can to show staff that you value their time and expertise.

This also includes benefits. Ping-pong tables and nap pods may look inviting when recruiting initially. However, long-term employees value tangible, useful benefits at the end of the day. Think about your unique workforce and what would benefit them the most. That can include stellar health insurance, a free gym membership or even flexible maternity and paternity leave policies.

READ: 5 Tips for Building a Strong Company Culture in a Hybrid Work Environment

Putting employees first

Above all, put your employees first. This seems cliche, but it takes a strong head and a big heart to lead in this new era of employee engagement. Ask for feedback, optimize your engagement strategies and constantly communicate in order to meet the unique needs of your staff. Your bottom line and engagement rates will thank you.

 

Indiana Lee Bio PictureIndiana Lee is a writer, reader, and jigsaw puzzle enthusiast from the Pacific Northwest. An expert on business operations, leadership, marketing, and lifestyle, you can connect with her on LinkedIn.

Content Marketing to Engage Employees

You may think marketing is purely customer-focused, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Internal marketing — that is, marketing directed toward the people working for your company — can be a very useful tool for many businesses.

The content you use in an internal marketing campaign needs to be carefully considered. You shouldn’t simply advertise your products and services to employees nor reiterate information already provided in their training. Listing virtual office telephone system features, for example, is not a good example of internal marketing, no matter how impressive these might be.

Rather, internal marketing content should be focused on improving employee engagement. A worker who’s disinterested in the company they work for will not give their all, so your job should be to create content that gets them enthused and interested again.

In this article, we’ll provide a few examples of the kind of content you can use in an internal marketing campaign, the best way to deliver it, and the reasons you should be investing in internal marketing today.

The delivery of marketing content is as important as the content itself. 

What Type of Content Can I Use for Internal Marketing?

The biggest difference between internal and external marketing is the kind of content you should focus on. With the latter, the emphasis should be on what your company can do, so advertising the benefits of your products is a priority. With internal marketing, the attention should instead be on your employees and providing information that will benefit and motivate them.

The best example of this is the most common form of internal marketing: the company newsletter. This is a brief periodical that shares news about the company (staff changes, product releases, etc.) and, more importantly, provides a place to celebrate employee achievements.

The opportunity to be rewarded and recognized is essential for effective employee engagement, as it gives workers a reason to be invested in their jobs.

Advice articles are another form of internal marketing content you can send out to employees. Try to find (or create, if you have the ability) short articles that provide tips on smart working procedures or improving output. Sharing an article on how to boost productivity with mindful working is a good example of this.

You can also use internal marketing content to encourage discussion about company decisions. This kind of content is the most direct way of getting employees to engage, as it’s essentially a feedback request. An example would be putting a poll on social media asking for employee opinions on department reorganization or the latest product release.

Unsplash Alex Kotliarskyi

How Can I Effectively Deliver Internal Marketing Content?

The delivery of marketing content is as important as the content itself. Firstly, pick a communications channel (or selection of channels) that ensures content is seen by the majority of employees. Secondly, create a marketing calendar so you can organize the dates and times this will be delivered.

You have lots of options when it comes to selecting the channels you send content through. If you provide employees with a company email address, this is a good way to send content and ensure it’s seen by at least some of your workers, though it doesn’t guarantee it will be read. Putting content on social media is a more modern alternative, but requires you to create a social media group specifically for employees.

If you want your marketing content to actually be consumed, consider sharing it during video conferences, when you know employees will be in attendance. In an office environment, you can hand out a physical copy during in-person meetings. This mandatory consumption of content guarantees your message is delivered, but the forced nature of this dissemination might harm employee engagement.

Start early: introduce marketing materials to employees as part of your onboarding process to-do list. If you hold in-person training sessions, trainers should be made aware of the content you’re looking to share and how to access it. Having an automated employee onboarding process is useful in this regard as you can program marketing content — like product information and productivity advice — directly into the automated system.

Finally, make sure you schedule gaps in your marketing calendar. Too much content can be annoying and distracting for employees, especially if it’s sent out during a large or difficult project. Poor timing can mean you don’t get the full benefit of internal marketing.

Be sure to track results in the same way you would for your user engagement strategy. 

What are the Benefits of Internal Marketing?

There are tons of benefits to good internal marketing, both for you and your employees. As mentioned above, improved employee engagement is one of the most notable. When workers feel your company cares for and notices them, this leads to a renewed faith in your brand.

Employees that are engaged will be more productive and tend to provide better customer service, as they truly believe the company can benefit the customer (just as it has benefitted them). Furthermore, internal marketing can educate your employees on what you do, so the information they provide to customers is more accurate, relevant, and helpful.

If you’re providing the right content, internal marketing can even protect your team from burnout. Articles with mental health tips mean employees have information available to stop them from becoming overwhelmed. Providing recognition of employee achievements in company newsletters can also provide motivation and deliver a sense of satisfaction.

Engagement,concept

Marketing isn’t Just for Customers

Although we’ve detailed the differences between customer and employee-focused marketing above, the underlying concepts are very similar. So, when you’re researching marketing strategies for consumer-targeted content, remember many of these can be applied to internal marketing too.

At the heart of both kinds of marketing is that your company is beneficial to the people it engages with, whether that means purchasing from the company or working for it. If you keep this idea at the center of your campaigns, you’re sure to see many benefits.

 

Jenna BunnellJenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications system and call center scheduling software that provides valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways.