How To Keep New Employees Engaged

In order to keep new employees engaged can be a difficult task for most managers and needs proper planning from the start. Failing to manage employee engagement you will find yourself without good reliable staff in no time.

Disengaged employees either leave soon after starting for better ground or get dismissed for perceived poor performance.

What is employee engagement?

Why is employee engagement important?

What are the main employee engagement outcomes?

What are the benefits of employee engagement?

The 4 elements of employee engagement?

What are the 3 levels of employee engagement?

What is an employee engagement strategy?

Must you measure employee engagement?

How to increase employee engagement

Employee engagement tools

How to keep new employees engaged - Conclusion

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is the act of management to ensure that employees are provided with the opportunity to perform their tasks and functions as required. Through proper leadership, employees become engaged when opportunities are created to develop their skills.

Employee engagement in other words is the action of leadership keeping employees productive through innovation and growth. Even the best employees cannot keep themselves engaged all the time and will need management guidance at some stage.

Why is employee engagement important?

It is very important to manage employee engagement from the start. It is proven that the commitment of new employees is gained or lost within the first week of arriving in their new workplace.

Employee engagement is not just important to the new employee but also of great importance for your organization. There are not many in leadership that will consider focusing on employee engagement as important.

This is mainly because of their perception of what employee engagement really is. Merely keeping people busy with trivial matters is not engagement and nothing will be achieved in the long run.

The main three reasons why immediate employee engagement for new employees is very important is because:

It makes them feel valued in the new environment and gives them the opportunity to immediately display their skills.
It helps the organization set specific goals and objectives to measure the new employee's abilities from the start.
It builds the foundation for integration into the new team

What are the main employee engagement outcomes?

When you are starting a new recruitment drive to find employees for your organization you are expecting certain outcomes from the process. These outcomes or as some call them "results" should add value to the current business processes.

As a leader and a manager, new employees are meant to strengthen your team and make life easier for everyone. By managing and applying employee engagement correctly you expect to see the following positive outcomes:

Your employees are busy with the right things
It is not difficult to achieve goals
You have great team spirit
Team efficiencies are high
Individuals can focus on personal growth
Productivity levels are high and consistent

On the other side of the coin, a lack of employee engagement will have negative outcomes such as:

Poor productivity
Toxic workplace
Defragmented team
Workforce content to just "work" and go home
Failure to achieve targets and goals

Overall you will end up with a poor organizational culture that will reflect poorly on your leadership.

What are the benefits of employee engagement?

The benefits of employee engagement management are probably one of the highest rewarding functions of a manager or organizational leader. It is a characteristic that stands out above anything else in any industry.

The benefits are countless and if you can get it right your organization will prosper. Just some of the main benefits are:

Positive organizational culture
High productivity levels
A great trust relationship between leadership and employees
Innovative teamwork
Positive customer relationships
High labour retention
High level of discipline
Employees believe in self-development
Positive organizational growth

When employees are highly engaged it is visible and you can feel the positivity.

The 4 elements of employee engagement

There are for main elements involved in employee engagement management. Each of these elements contributes to creating a positive organizational culture.

These elements are:

Leadership
Motivation
Development
Reward

Leadership

Leadership has to set guidelines for the employees. This is done based on the organizational vision and mission statements. Goals and targets are set for measuring progress and achievements.

Managing total engagement is the only way that you can achieve these goals. By getting your employees involved by doing the right things at the right time these goals will be achievable.

Without managing your team's input you will not achieve your goals.

4 Key Elements of new employee engagement.

Motivation

Not only new employees but also the existing ones will need constant motivation to participate in teamwork. Motivation to take responsibility and accountability ensures that your employees remain focused and therefore engaged.

Without motivation, your employees will become complacent and unproductive. Not everyone has the ability to motivate themselves all of the time.

Development

The easiest way to get employees engaged is through constant self-development. Learning new skill sets should be a top priority for any employee hoping to grow into an asset.

Should they not be afforded the opportunity they will lose the drive to perform and become totally unproductive as a team player. If this is the case only leadership can be blamed as they did not recognize employee needs.

Reward

The reward is still one of the biggest engagement strategies you can use to develop your team. No matter what anyone thinks but the bottom line is that every person in employment is there for getting rewarded.

Nobody is working for fun although enjoying your responsibilities is necessary. Without some form of reward, it will not be easy to enjoy anything even when you love doing it.

What are the 3 levels of employee engagement?

There are basically three levels of engagement in any organization so it is not difficult to identify what level the employee is operating at.

Actively Engaged
Actively Disengaged
Not engaged

Actively engaged employees are the ones that can be visually observed to enjoy what they do. They are also the employees who will participate and provide positive input in all business activities.

These employees will normally be self-motivated and complete their work to the best of their ability. They will provide a healthy and positive vibe to those that surround them.

Actively disengaged employees will do their work just to the point of not getting into trouble. They do not motivate themselves to do better or improve their current status without direct supervision or instruction.

They will, however, do their own work and follow the leader as they accept that as fate.

Not engaged employees are the moaners and groaners in the organization. The total lack of self-motivation is evident and they normally do their best to create a negative vibe in the workplace.

Their work output is also very low and normally sub-standard.

They do not participate in any team projects as they feel it is not their work to do so.
In other words, they are only there to collect their salary.

By being able to identify where employees place themselves within your team it will be easier to address their development plan in the organization. Ultimately it is a case of if you don't adapt, you're out.

What is an employee engagement strategy?
An employee engagement strategy is a combination of using leadership skills, resources, and structured planning to engage new employees from day one. This strategy will be followed through the term of employment to make sure they remain engaged.

Leadership skills
Applying your leadership skills you are responsible for creating an "Employee Engagement" policy that will include all the phases from recruitment to exit. As with normal leadership responsibilities, it is something that needs to be monitored and measured on a regular basis or it will become disengaged faster than your new employee.

Engagement resources

There are several policies and guidelines already in place within your organization. These combined with organizational vision and mission statements should form the basis for employee engagement.

Just some of these resources included will be:

Recruitment and selection policy
Induction policy
Job Description
Employee Contracts
Work measurement programs
Training and Development Policies
Standard operating procedures

Structured planning

It is important to keep a new employee engaged so that your engagement plan is structured in such a way that everybody in the organization is involved. Isolating a new employee with only a select few members of your team will not work.

Your employee engagement plan should also have specific phases such as:

Initiation
Implementation
Measurement
Regular Feedback
Bi-Annual assessments

These phases should remain intact throughout each employee's career to keep them engaged.

Must you measure employee engagement?

If you want to maintain high productivity and achieve your leadership goals with the help of a highly efficient team then it is a priority. Without measuring employment engagement you will never notice who contributes the most to positive outcomes.

Over and above your regular productivity and performance measurements there are other measurements you can implement for employee engagement.

There are basically four main key performance indicators that will show employee engagement levels.

Inclusion and participation
Outcome performance
Employee satisfaction
Labour turnover

Inclusion and participation

It is important to measure each employee on how they participate in a team activity. This can be done by looking at what responsibilities they have as an individual and how they take accountability for them.

It is important to see how each individual contributes to the team dynamics and how their performance affects others.

Outcome performance

How productive is an employee and how positive are their results measured against targets? Consistency in negative outcomes can point you towards disengagement.

An engaged employee in general will perform better and provide you with positive results. You will also be able to measure performance from the feedback you receive from customers and suppliers that deal with them.

Employee satisfaction

The only way other than observation is to run employee satisfaction surveys on a regular basis. These will indicate how they see their own performance, how they perceive their value and their opinion of the organization in general.

In order to get usable information, these surveys should be done anonymously. That is unless there is an experienced person that can establish these facts through private one-on-one sessions.

Labour turnover

A good indication of how well your employee engagement efforts are working will be your labour turnover. Research done indicated that a 10% labour turnover is normal but higher than that indicates problems.

Exit interviews will help you understand why employees are leaving.

Productivity and Employee Performance tracking

How to increase employee engagement

Once you have gone through the pain of recruiting and appointing a new employee it will not help you to leave them to their own means. The induction period is important and will play a major role in your strategy to keep an employee engaged.

A good starting point will be to ensure that you know your organization and its long-term goals better than anyone you have reporting to you. It is important that as their leader you know why your employees are working for you and what are their needs.

There are several methods you can apply for increased employee engagement. Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as an inspiration to assess your employees.

Ensure that the employees know their duties and responsibilities from the beginning. Uncertainty can be a good initiator of disengagement.
Provide them with the tools and means to perform their work. This will create enjoyable working conditions without distraction.
Set clear goals so all the employees know what they are working for.
Ask and value employee input. It generates confident employees that feel appreciated.
Praise good performance and celebrate achievements.
Allocate tasks that will make employees keen to participate and give them the opportunity to accept responsibility. Don't shoot down failures with a negative attitude but rather use them as an opportunity to coach your employees.

With time and experience, you will learn that keeping employees engaged is a long-term investment in your own performance and leadership ability.

It does not mean what is good and acceptable for an employee today will be still acceptable one year from now.

Popular employee engagement tools

To assist you in measuring and planning employee engagement a few tools have been developed through the years. Always keep in mind that any engagement tool requires consistency and full participation to work.

Although engagement tools are now moving towards a software platform it is not always the most effective. It will all depend on the composition of your team.

Here are 2 of my favourite employee engagement tools

Backlog is a team collaboration software tool that keeps everyone in touch even when working remotely.

Paychex can handle your recruitment process from the recruiting stage to induction to ensure applicants remain fully engaged while getting incorporated into your organizational structures.