Workforce engagement is directly linked to your business performance. It plays a role in more than just your productivity. It affects your bottom line too. Low engagement leads to high turnover, which leads to increased hiring and training costs. With the right strategy, you can maintain an engaged team that not only does their work well, but sticks around to see your business succeed with their colleagues.

Defining Employee Engagement

We first need to learn some context. Employee engagement is a worker's emotional commitment to their role and organization. A sign that an employee is exceptionally engaged is if they go above and beyond their assigned responsibilities. Some key indicators of employee engagement are:

• Satisfaction: how happy is your team with their jobs?
• Productivity: although productivity is influenced by a number of forces, engagement is one of the stronger forces.
• Retention: how often are you employees leaving the company?

These are all important to keep an eye on as you work to improve your organization’s work culture.

The Growing Problem of Disengaged Employees

Employee disengagement costs, and it costs a lot. Gallup estimates that the results of disengagement cost businesses $550 billion per year. To make matters worse, a lot of traditional engagement strategies fail to manage the problem. Cash incentives aren’t as effective as they used to be. Modern workers are looking for more meaningful recognition and benefits that advance their well-being. Generic recognition can backfire and harm your efforts instead as employees look for personalized recognition instead.

Modern workforce engagement strategies need to consider not just the needs of your workers but the technologies they are using every day. That’s why we created CultureBot for Slack. With AI-powered employee engagement tools, CultureBot enables you to send personalized recognition to your teams, start conversations every day, play collaborative games, and send high-response rate surveys every day. Book a demo today to see how CultureBot can engage your team.

How to Engage Your Distributed Workforce

With the workplace being more decentralized than ever before thanks to remote work, modern engagement strategies need to be digital-first and target employees in virtual spaces they’re already using like Slack. Some great places to start are to build meaningful connections as well as recognize and celebrate individuals who uphold your company values.

Build Meaningful Connections Across Your Company

Simply starting the day with a water-cooler conversation starter can make a huge difference too. CultureBot can generate conversation starters at times of your choice each day in a Slack channel to get your teams chatting.

Celebrate Individuals and Company Values

Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash

Personalized recognition can go a long way when it comes to workforce engagement. Some ways you can accomplish this are:

• Customized birthday announcements: celebrate employee birthdays with your entire team with a Slack announcement. While you’re at it, say a few words about how they have upheld your company values over the past year.
• Spotlight employee accomplishments: encourage peer recognition. CultureBot has a great shout out feature that enables anyone on your team to recognize the hard work of a colleague. You can even earn points for receiving shoutouts that can be used for rewards chosen by managers.
• Share value-focused content: share news, inspirational images, and research that upholds your company values and encourages your team to grow and succeed.

Expert Tips to Increase Your Team’s Bond

Jim Goodnight once said, “treat employees like they make a difference, and they will.” To do that, there’s three elements to keep in mind:

1. Offer work-life balance incentives.
2. Encourage personal growth through mentorship.
3. Align rewards to core values and employee aspirations.

Work-Life Balance Incentives

This is especially important if your employees work from home some or all of the time. To thrive, they need to be able to ‘unplug’ from work and from their devices. Workplaces can offer breaks and vacations and promote wellness and self-care activities. Teams can also encourage the use of auto replies to communicate an employee’s non-work hours.

One critical thing to remember is that your leadership team should be modeling good work-life balance behaviors. If they demonstrate respect for personal time and healthy working hours, the rest of your team will follow suit.

Encouraging Personal Growth: Mentorships

Employees aren’t static. They are learning and growing human beings that can add more value to themselves and your business over time. You can help cultivate this by encouraging them to grow their skills over time. One way to do that is to encourage mentorship within your team, where your more experienced leaders can teach your employees skills that will make them stronger workers.

Align Rewards to Core Values and Employee Aspirations

As noted earlier, money isn’t always the best motivator. When rewarding your teams, think about your company’s values and the aspirations of your employees. What do they want, and how does that relate to your values? For example, if one of your values is innovation, you could recognize employees for creative problem solving or for implementing new ideas.

Follow a Structured Engagement Framework

No matter how you decide to go about developing your workforce engagement strategy, having a structured engagement framework is non-negotiable. You need to be able to track your current performance, set goals, and continuously monitor your progress and iterate. You can assess your current status with regular pulse surveys. Tools like CultureBot can help you do that right in Slack with high response rates.

You should be setting goals based on benchmark data so that you can ensure those goals are achievable and reasonable. Use those monitoring tools regularly to continuously monitor your progress and pivot when necessary to ensure you’re still on the right path to success.

Make Time for Fun with Morale-Boosting Activities

Building workforce engagement and morale can be made a lot easier with one critical element: fun! Schedule regular trivia nights, contests and social hours to encourage your team to build deeper connections and relax. You can host virtual game nights and immersive team adventures online. Even during the workday, try adding a dose of humor and levity to your messages to lighten things up.

CultureBot: Your Workforce Engagement Strategy’s Silver Bullet

Cultivating an engaged team isn’t just good for the health and wellbeing of your workforce – it adds to your competitive advantage. Not only does it help you retain the best workers on your team, but it also reduces the cost of turnover and training. Your team will also be more productive, leading to greater output for your business. If you’re ready to take the next step to explore how you can cultivate a more engaged team, then it’s time to book a demo with CultureBot to see how our Slack engagement tool can help. See for yourself how our commitment to driving workforce engagement can transform your team.