A great company culture is one that creates and supports employee engagement. In this blog post, we share best practices for building a culture that drives employee motivation and engagement.
Engaged talents are excited about the people they work with, passionate about the work that they do, and loyal to the company they work for. One of the best and most effective ways to engage your employees is to have a great company culture.
An amazing culture and engaged employees form a perfect cycle—your engaged employees will feel supported by the culture and they’ll also proactively do what they can to sustain and improve it. The two build and feed off each other.
It can be hard to define your own company culture as well as implement it to drive engagement. According to a Deloitte survey, 87 percent of organizations cite culture and employee engagement as one of their top challenges.
Let’s take a look at 4 best practices for building a culture of engagement in your organization:
1. Kick Off New Hires With the Right Onboarding and Training Programs
A recent SHRM study showed that one-third of new hires left their jobs after only six months—that means you have less than six months to get employees engaged with the company and their positions.
If a new employee starts out at a company and feels overwhelmed, is unsure of his or her responsibilities, and doesn’t know his or her coworkers, it leads to stress and disengagement. To avoid this, create structured onboarding processes for new employees that define roles and responsibilities, share the company mission and values, give them the chance to ask questions early on, and allow them to meet other people in the company every day.
2. Support Employee Development
The best employees always strive to continue learning and improving themselves. Companies may be afraid to support these goals because they don’t want those employees to outgrow them or find opportunities elsewhere, but in reality, the best way to keep those people is to help them grow within your company.
Related: Who is Responsible for Employee Engagement?
Create a tuition reimbursement program or make trainings and other courses available to your employees, whether they come in the form of online classes or workshops taught by other employees. You can also offer every employee a monthly allowance for books or an audiobook subscription, like Audible.
3. Start a Company-Wide Content Hub
As companies get larger, each department can get more and more siloed, and information gets lost easily. Have you ever seen a marketing project that cited the same stats as sales demos, except that each one did their research from the ground up because the two functions never talked? Have you had a task that you thought, “I’m sure someone else at my company has done this”, but you didn’t know how to find the information related to this task?
Related: How to Reward Knowledge Sharing
When employees feel they have the tools to do their job and be effective, it makes them feel more engaged. An internal content hub empowers employees to do their jobs better, and it also gives them an avenue to reach out to and meet coworkers they might not run into in their regular day-to-day.
4. Ask for and Act on Feedback From Employees
Employees feel the most engaged when they believe they can make a difference in their workplace—that the executives listen to their ideas and that their contributions are helping move the company forward. A healthy culture encourages those opinions and acts on them.
Put a system in place for measuring employee satisfaction, like an employee version of an eNPS (employee net promoter score), and for collecting employee feedback. Over time, you’ll be able to see how different programs or processes you implement change employee happiness, and you can also make changes based on the feedback you receive.
Creating a great company culture enables employees to do their jobs more effectively and encourages them to meet and connect with their coworkers, which in turn improves employee engagement. By implementing these best practices, you can start building your engagement-driven culture!
To read more on employee engagement in the workplace, download our free eBook below!
