So many factors go into an engaged, productive and happy workforce. When you think you've solved the problems affecting one department in your business, another department starts to slack, and then it's back to the drawing board with regards to figuring out why certain employees are slacking in terms of productivity.
Ways to Improve Employee Engagement
Sometimes unhappy workers can be experiencing personal problems, but sometimes it can all simply be the result of a failure to spread out tasks efficiently or the consequence of giving the wrong person certain projects to complete.
In any case, it often comes down to a lack of motivation or drive on the part of the individual to really engage with the workload, and here are some tips to help your fix this problem if you're worried about low engagement across parts of your workforce.
Give them the chance to prove their worth.
Perhaps you're simply not challenging them. At the end of the day, your employees don't want to clock in and clock out. The job may be important to them, but people like to be challenged in order to keep their brain active and progressing towards the fullest of their potential.
The solution to this might be to give your employee chances to prove their worth, which could easily be achieved by offering rewards in the form of bonuses to those employees who make the most sales or prove themselves to be the most dedicated worker of the week.
Going the next step up, you could also offer the opportunity for a promotion to the individual who truly proves themselves at the end of the month.
Certain rewards might be easier to roll out on a regular basis than others, but as long as you keep the entire workforce motivated and driven to achieve that reward, you give individuals a purpose to improve themselves and strive towards an end goal.
Get the wage right.
Whilst everything mentioned in the previous point is true, it's also true that people want to be valued for their work monetarily.
There's a chance that your employees may feel unengaged if your business grows, the workload increases, and yet salaries remain the same. You need to remember to pay people for the work they do, and this means assessing employees on an individual level.
Low engagement or disgruntled workers can result from poor wage levels. You could look into providing manual business checks with your current accounting software so as to ensure that no mistakes are made with payroll checks for your workforce.
If you want to keep your workers productive, you need to pay them efficiently for what they do, as this is their livelihood. As passionate as people may be for their career, nobody wants to feel ripped off and work for less than they deserve.
A fun workplace.
Whilst nobody should be lounging around or doing nothing whilst working in your office, that doesn't mean you can't create a fun environment in which they can work. Simply installing a pool table or TV in the break room could give employees the chance to unwind and return to their work refreshed, re-energized and engaged. 🙂
