Tag: employee engagement software

How Company Culture Shapes Employee Engagement?

Deloitte research cites culture and engagement as the top challenges for 87 percent of organizations, particularly for measuring culture and engagement effectively. Measurement of both factors, culture, and engagement, is necessary as they yield major benefits. For developing a high-performance culture fueled by engaged employees, decouple the two – culture and engagement – and see each as an individual entity with its own set of contributions. 

Companies with high-performing cultures are innovative and customer-focused and meet their strategic objectives under their values. In the same way, employees who are engaged are more productive and far less likely to leave the company. Both are important and closely related, but they differ in nature, and hence, measuring a company’s culture and employee engagement requires specific metrics. Unfortunately, companies often employ the same tool to measure both. For example, when employee surveys are conducted, there is no specific questionnaire for measuring the culture and understanding level of employee engagement. Your cultural change and employee engagement programs will fail if you aren’t clear on what you are measuring.

Can any one aspect – company culture or employee engagement – thrive by itself?

Although many managers believe that employee engagement surveys alone can boost productivity, it is not so. Improving the organization’s overall culture with a higher level of employee engagement is a far better way to boost business productivity and drive growth. To simply put, employee engagement is inextricably related to the strength of the company culture.

Understanding what is Employee Engagement

An employee’s engagement has to do with how employees feel about their workplace and work culture. The healthier a company’s culture is, the easier it becomes for the employees to grasp their roles and responsibilities. Engagement leads to happier, more motivated, and more committed employees. 

Engaged employees are more likely to be:

  • Dedicated and motivated to exceed their company’s goals.
  • Positive and proactive about acquiring new skills and being creative in resolving problems.
  • Devoted to building their careers with an organization

Engaged employees add a multitude of benefits to an organization, which include increased productivity, stronger customer relationships, and decreased turnover, to name a few. 

Also read: Why is employee engagement important for your company?

What do stats have to say about employee engagement and culture?

Interestingly, looking at certain stats, it is undeniable that employee engagement is closely related to a company’s high-performing and healthy culture.

Understanding what is company culture

Simply put, company culture refers to the employees’ norms, practices, and behaviour that influence how and why certain events or actions happen in an organization. 

Company cultures that excel can have a positive impact on all areas of an organization. Engaged employees, increased productivity, achievement of goals and increased retention are all hallmarks of high-performance work cultures. A company with a strong culture, for example, has a 14 per cent employee turnover rate when compared with a company with a subpar culture, which has a 48 per cent turnover rate.

In what ways does a high-performance culture differ from a usual company culture?

A high-performance culture focuses on following effective and workable practices and norms to drive superior employee performance in an organization.

To elaborate, it’s a culture that allows a performance-driven organization to achieve superior financial and non-financial results, with values such as better service, high employee engagement; improved client satisfaction; increased productivity, and employee retention, over a long period.

Also read: How to build a positive workplace culture and its benefits

Company culture and employee engagement: how are they unique?

To differentiate between the two, think of employee engagement as focusing on an employee (or ‘I’ factor) and culture as emphasizing the whole (‘or ‘we’ factor). Therefore, the employee engagement factor has to do with how employees feel about their employer and their workplace work. 

An engagement survey can make a good predictor of employee retention, as it can measure loyalty and productivity. Managerial actions or other factors can severely affect employee engagement or even hurt it quickly.

Culture, on the other hand, focuses on intrinsic company values, which are often unquantifiable and difficult to assess. An organization’s culture is, essentially, ‘the way we do things.’ Changing culture takes time and effort because it’s often deeply ingrained. Hence, to influence a company’s culture, you must engage in a long-term reform program, or you must experience a significant external change, like an acquisition or merger.

Thus, employee engagement focuses on keeping employees motivated and happy while company culture lies deeply buried within an organization based on certain values, practices, norms, and a set of beliefs. To understand each of them better, it is necessary to understand how to measure your company culture and engagement.

Why is it necessary to measure engagement and culture?

Measuring culture and employee engagement is crucial since engaged employees are directly linked to employee retention, performance, and a company’s profitability. Importantly, the measurement of company culture and employee engagement helps to understand whether employees’ engagement and commitment align with a company’s expectations and strategic objectives or not. 

Most organizations adopt certain metrics to measure company culture and employee engagement. To start with any form of quantifiable measurement, understand and know where the culture stands now and what steps you have taken to create a high-performing culture. 

Unlike employee engagement, culture focuses on an organization’s core values and vision, and hence, any type of off-the-shelf survey will not be effective.

How company culture and engagement are assessed differently?

Culture and engagement are not only measured for different reasons, they must also be evaluated differently. For instance, you can find out how engaged your employees are based on the scores of your employee engagement survey. Using this data, you can then determine what improvements can be made. You can compare employees’ performance to that of previous years or similar organizations to get clarity on employee engagement and performance.

On the other hand, when it comes to culture, there is no right or wrong way to respond. Based on its goals and business objectives, an organization must identify what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Viewpoints on culture differ greatly from one organization to the next. For example, the culture of a bank will differ greatly from that of a start-up.

How does company culture shape employee engagement?

High-performance company culture is directly related to employee engagement, as the culture clearly defines healthy and supportive values and behaviors. In such a culture, employees know what’s expected of them and how their environment positively influences their performance. They feel connected, involved, and supported. Owing to all these factors which build up a conducive culture, they tend to be engaged. To enhance employee engagement, begin by strengthening your company culture, and here are several methods to do so:

1. Clearly define company culture

Culture forms the heart and soul of your organization, and thus, you need a strong culture to foster strong employee engagement. To get started, the leadership team should outline:

  • Company’s mission, vision, and values
  • Employee behavior expectations
  • Define culture and document it as a presentation or on your Intranet system, or in an employee handbook. Make your document widely available once it has been created and follow up on your defined culture. All hands meet or virtual gatherings can be held for the same.

2. Conduct Employee Surveys

Regularly assess your organization’s culture. By doing so, you’ll:

  • Learn what works in your company culture and how you can improve it.
  • Give employees a voice and you’ll discover new ideas you might not have thought of.

3. Work on employee feedback

When you decide to engage employees’ feedback, the payoff will be immense. The employees will sense that they are helping to shape the company culture, and their engagement will increase. Communicate the actions you plan to implement based on their feedback. Hold focus groups to discuss your action plan. Encourage employees to participate in brainstorming sessions to generate ideas.

Also Read: How To Create A Feedback Culture In Your Workplace?

Conclusion

Creating a strong culture for employee engagement has its own set of challenges – more like an ebb and flow, as it is not a one-time task. For long-term value, your culture needs to be nurtured regularly and for the same, measuring culture and employee engagement is crucial. In the process, you shall understand how satisfied and committed an employee is to her job. 

By offering training regular sessions, managerial encouragement, and keeping an open mind about effective workplace practices, companies can meet the expectations of employees to create a high-performance culture. 

In a nutshell, employee engagement is an ongoing process and is inextricably related to company culture. Over time, you need to focus on employee needs, and then use that information to create a strong company culture.

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Employee Engagement Software to Help Enhance Productivity

Given the current global scenario, most organizations are frantically trying to figure out how to hold and uplift employee engagement. Now that almost everything has gone virtual, working remotely while being cooped up at home is not a very pleasant experience for most employees. As a result, many have been losing motivation, dropping in engagement levels and conflicted on the edge of frustration and burnout. As an employer, how many times have you thought about your employees’ happiness and actually did something to make them happy?

You can say that you have had employee engagement activities and conducted employee satisfaction surveys to ensure employee happiness. But do you think these initiatives are enough to help your employees tackle a situation they have never faced before? No, its not. To top this, different people have different perceptions of happiness as well.

Also Read: Performance Appraisal Mistakes To Avoid As A Manager

Employee happiness is not just feeling happy all the time. It is feeling positive about work, being willing to fix problems rather than complaining, and accepting constructive criticism and constantly trying to improve oneself without feeling pressured. According to Sonja Lyubomirsky’s ‘The How Of Happiness’, 50% of happiness is genetically predetermined, while 10% is because of circumstances in life (Family, health etc.) and 40% is the result of your outlook.

As an employer, you cannot do anything about the first two but the last 40% of happiness is something you can help your employees with. Analyzing what makes employees happy is quite difficult, but changing the structure of your daily work pattern and prioritising employee happiness is more difficult.

We all know that improving employee satisfaction leads to a better work atmosphere and makes teamwork effortless. But it is not easy for an employer to suddenly change their perspective and work towards individual employee happiness. So instead, here’s a list of things that you  can do easily with the help of an employee engagement software and drive employee happiness and productivity.

Also read: Guide to Setting Employee Goals Through Engagedly

Be open to listening

Even before COVID-19, many employees struggled to be heard. Now that the world has gone virtual, most employees feel dissatisfied with their jobs because their opinions are often not valued. This behaviour leads to the disengagement of employees, eventually leading to dissatisfaction with work. Give your employees a chance to express what they feel and allow them to contribute their ideas at work.

Using employee engagement software allows employees to bring out their ideas and express their feelings on a common platform easily. This drives engagement and improves productivity in turn.

Recognize their efforts

Appreciation is the key to keeping employees motivated and engaged, especially when they are not getting the opportunity to be present in an office environment. They are losing out on many impromptu chances at receiving verbal recognition. Recognize the efforts of your employees and reward them. Reward doesn’t always mean money, because money is a short-term motivator. Many other things can be used as rewards to recognize good work.

Using an employee engagement software like Engagedly, which allows you to add features like employee recognition and rewards, allows users to recognize and reward their employees for their accomplishments.

Continuous learning

Training employees and providing them with the necessary resources makes them feel that their company is invested in them. The employees who receive training are usually better satisfied and are motivated than their counterparts who do not receive frequent training.

Continuous training or learning directly affects the organizational growth because of the changing economy. There are many employee engagement software which also include learning and development for employee benefit. Engagedly’s learning management system allows you to create, assign and take courses in various formats and reward them accordingly.

Also Read: OKR Examples For Your Finance Team To Balance Growth, Cost And Efficiency

Consistent priorities

Employees need to have direction and consistency when they are working. Does the line “drop everything and do this right now” sound familiar? Bad managers use it very often and it is quite annoying for their employees to understand why the task is so important that it disrupts their daily work pattern. If you want employees to prioritize certain tasks over others, then you need to communicate why. It is easier to disrupt your routine or shift priorities when you know why exactly you need to do so.

Having an effective employee engagement system for monitoring and prioritizing works could be a solution. With Engagedly’s OKRs and Ongoing Check-ins, it is easier to understand your employee priorities and assign them work accordingly.

Seamless communication system

We all know how the pandemic has affected our level of communication. When managers cannot communicate with their staff, it leads to a whole host of problems. Imagine an employer not being able to communicate company goals with their employees properly. The first ones to be affected by this behaviour are the employees. Employees feel happy and motivated to work only if their goals and responsibilities are clearly communicated to them. And this is just a small example. A lack of communication can seriously affect engagement, and productivity, and kill morale.

Communication does not always come easy. But it is something that becomes easier to do, over time. All managers need to do is start the conversation. Using employee engagement software allows employees to smoothly and easily engage in conversations with their colleagues and managers.

It is important to remember, that at the end of the day, managers cannot magically make employees happy. Happiness is a very individual concept and managers cannot fix all problems. Managers can try to make employees happy and lead the way, but ultimately, it is not the responsibility of the manager and the entire burden of employee happiness should not rest on their shoulders.

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Employee Engagement Software Can Enhance Work Culture

We understand if you are skimming through this article with certain amount of scepticism in mind. It’s common to see software marketed as if it will be able to revolutionize a business and bring about extraordinary results, with a simple download or connection to a cloud-based app.

Continue reading “Employee Engagement Software Can Enhance Work Culture”

How Employee Engagement Software Can Boost Employee Engagement

What is the impact of poor employee engagement?

What does an organization have to lose by having low levels of employee engagement? After all, it is not the sole reason why organizations continue to keep running. However, while it might not be the sole reason why organizations continue to run, it does play a big role in keeping organizations running smoothly.

Continue reading “How Employee Engagement Software Can Boost Employee Engagement”

Can Employee Engagement Software Really Improve Workplace Climate?

It is very common to see software marketed as if it is able to revolutionize a business and bring about amazing results just with a simple download or connecting to a cloud-based app.

Continue reading “Can Employee Engagement Software Really Improve Workplace Climate?”