Your New Year’s resolution should be to increase employee engagement

How do bored employees help a company succeed? It’s not a trick question – they don’t! All around the U.S. offices are filled with completely capable, skilled, intelligent workers who simply aren’t motivated by their jobs.

A Gallup survey of close to 81,000 U.S. full- and part-time employees found that a mere 32 percent of workers were engaged at work in 2015. This is discouraging news, especially considering how hard businesses work to turn a profit.
So the question is, why are employees not engaged? Companies need to task their top personnel with figuring out this answer and developing an engagement plan to address the reasons and propose solutions.
If you’re not sure where to begin, here are several steps:
1. Meet with C-Suite executives and discuss problems
Change starts from the top of a company, so in order for managers – whether department heads or human resources personnel – to take the necessary steps to improve engagement levels, they need to convince top executives to fund the initiative.
The best way to do this is for managers to gather as much information as possible through surveys, focus groups and one-on-one meetings. Then, they should develop a comprehensive report specifically spelling out why employees are bored. Finally, those leaders should propose solutions  backed up by metrics to help measure improved engagement. Executives will probably want hard statistics, and these could come in the form of follow-up surveys and charts  comparing the difference in ROI before and after the engagement plan was put into place.
2. Create a plan that makes sense
First and foremost, you need to identify your company’s brand before you write an engagement plan. Not doing so means you’re developing a strategy with little direction and clarity. And, as you can imagine, it’ll likely fail to include the right solutions for your specific workplace engagement dilemma.
3. Develop a long-term action plan
Offices are living environments that transform constantly over time. Business processes change, new employees come and old ones move on to different opportunities, and customers and clients have new demands and expectations.
This means your engagement plan may be obsolete two, three or even four years from now. It’s critical you explain to top executives how an engagement plan isn’t a one-time ordeal. It’s something you may need to re-visit every so often and therefore a project that should be observed in the yearly budget.
There are plenty of ways to increase employee engagement. The first step is recognizing how important motivated employees are. The second step is gathering the information. The third step is developing a report to present to higher-ups, and the final step is implementing and measuring the plan’s success.
If you’d like to learn more about how to improve engagement and motivation rates, consider an employee development program, starting with e-learning courses. Here you can learn all about how to improve the attitude and motivation of your staff.
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