4 Key Steps To Increase Employee Engagement And Decrease Turnover
Employee engagement is one of the most critical factors for a company’s overall success. With the right approach, you can increase work quality, productivity and decrease turnover.
Employee turnover is inevitable. Employees move on, securing other opportunities - it’s the circle of life. But, too much employee turnover can lead to low morale, creating a negative work environment that ultimately will effect productivity and your bottom line.
Focusing on employee engagement can help you to analyze and assess elements that are considered crucial to your team’s working environment, allowing you to keep your key players invested and happy.
How to improve employee engagement
Create measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Outline a strategy, keeping the following ITIL V4 Guiding Principle in mind: “Everything the Organization does should link back, directly or indirectly, to value for itself, its customers, and other stakeholders.” In other words: You should design KPIs that directly relate to a desired outcome such as: “Improved Customer Perception.” An example KPI in this area might be related to reducing hold times for phone calls, so your KPI might be, “Hold times for all calls received by the Service Desk of 3 minutes or less per call.” When developing and implementing KPIs for a Service Desk, it is critical to think more about departmental level goals, and less about individual goals. If your gut feeling is to implement a KPI to measure an individual person’s failure, you may wish to work individually with that team member on a Corrective Action Plan or Performance Improvement Plan rather than implementing a broad KPI for the full team.
Once you’ve established 4-5 reasonable KPIs, it is critical to ensure that your employees understand minimum expectations. How can they build from there improving their performance to stand out amongst their peers? What can they do in their downtime to continue personal development? Are there certifications or training courses they can take?
Establish a two-way communication channel
Although face-to-face communication remains the most effective form of relaying information in the business world, any channel is better than no channel. Ensure that you communicate not only the KPIs but the business reason driving the implementation of those KPIs. Some members of your team may find it critical to their success to understand why we are doing something, not just how to do something. Ensure that your communication process allows for individuals to submit feedback, if not directly in person, through email, IM, or even an anonymous survey.
In order to drive commitment and support it is crucial employees throughout the company stay updated during every step of the process. This will eliminate the potential issue of employees feeling that they are being kept in the dark, and will foster openness to the process. Keeping lines of communication open goes a long way in successfully executing a successful change management process. Create or use an existing platform to keep everyone on the same page – a newsletter, messaging board or a notification tool will do the job.
When communicating new corporate improvement projects such as implementation of department level KPIs, it is important to deliver the information in two ways:
From the Leadership Team - The purpose for the overall improvement project should be communicated by the Executive Leadership Team to provide additional weight to the importance of the message. Employees tend to get on board with a change more quickly when they know it is sponsored from the top leadership, especially when the purpose behind the change is communicated from this level.
From a Direct Supervisor - The messaging from the direct supervisor should focus on, “How this affects me in my day-to-day work activities.” Tell your team that this change is coming, and inform them directly of any impact to their daily activities. Whenever possible, communicate not only the actual change, but the purpose for the change to help develop employee engagement and stakeholder buy-in across the company.
Incentivize performance
People respond to incentives. In order to help drive a successful change within your organization, incentives can be used to help engage your employees. Though financial incentives tend to be one of the easiest ways to get attention, depending on your company’s policies, you may be able to incentivize good performance or a quick buy-in and engagement through something as simple as allowing someone to take an extra break during their shift, or work from home on Friday.
Be sure to reward employee performance through metrics or workload completion reports. Keep in mind that your hourly employees may not need a huge cash bonus to get engaged or excited about a corporate change - sometimes something as simple as a team lunch with an open discussion or brainstorming session to develop new ideas for the department is enough to get your team excited and talking.
Listen to your team
There tend to be two main types of employees in a Service Desk or IT Department:
Those who just need to know the “what” and the “how.”
And those who also need to know the “why.”
Sometimes just explaining the backstory on why a process flows the way it does is enough to get someone’s gears turning. Even your most entry level Service Desk employee will develop a better way to do things over time. Make sure that you are an active listener when a member of your team approaches you with an idea. Odds are good that the person doing the most tedious, repetitive work in your company has ideas that will make your IT Operations run better.
When a team member’s idea gets implemented, make sure that the appropriate credit is given to that person. Showing praise and gratitude for new and innovative ideas will only encourage other team members to continue to come forward with fresh and exciting solutions.
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