Your employees are the greatest assets in your organization, and sure enough, your human resources team has likely invested a lot of effort in recruiting the highest-quality talents. It certainly makes sense to ensure that these highly qualified employees will continue to work with you to succeed. Unfortunately, experience and skills are not enough to gauge their performance. With an employee performance tool, you can sustain the highest performance level by supporting employee engagement strategies and ensuring a healthy workplace culture.
Employees who are disengaged will not make the most effort to fulfill their responsibilities. Their engagement and performance may be affected by workplace culture factors, such as rituals, values, and beliefs. Employee engagement can be defined as an optimum level of motivation to do well at work, with a combined passion for the work, and feel personally connected to the organization and the team. Engaged managers and employees are highly invested in their efforts to ensure the success of their teams and the organization.
How does employee engagement and workplace culture affect employee performance?
The answer can be explained by Herzberg’s Motivation Theory model. Also known as the two-factor theory, it states that an organization must adjust two factors to encourage motivation. These factors are:
- Motivating factors – Found within an actual job and causes employees to work harder
- Hygiene factors – While not present in an actual job, they do surround the job, and their lack or absence could cause employees to become unmotivated.
Employee engagement is an important aspect of that theory’s motivational aspect, and workplace culture is critical to the hygiene aspect. As per the theory, an employee won’t do well without the right workplace culture, which should also encourage the development of a good employee engagement strategy. You may be able to measure and identify those crucial factors using employee engagement software.
4 ways to improve employee engagement
Ensure fair remuneration & consistent appreciation for a job well done
Employees may feel that it is pointless to go to work if they are not paid fairly. However, that does not mean that a salary increase is a solution. It will only motivate employees for a short amount of time, so it’s not a long-term solution. Instead, you could add some recognition by praising them for a job well done and provide positive reinforcement.
Encourage good working relationships with peers and leaders
A hostile work environment is bad for most people. Employees naturally want to have positive and healthy relationships with everyone in the office. With an employee performance tool, you can identify problems and develop a better culture by getting to know each team member, having genuine concern over their development and growth, holding everyone accountable, addressing their interpersonal conflicts, and providing opportunities for everyone to bond in a relaxed setting.
Deliver a vision that explains why the job is meaningful
Employees want to be sure that they are making an impact to enrich not just their own lives but others as well. They need to find purpose in what they are doing.
Incentivize compliance to policies and consistent performance
Give bonuses and positive feedback where possible. You could also give incentives in the form of increased paid leaves, wellness programs, celebrations of their accomplishments, or a flexible working schedule.
How can you improve workplace culture?
Keep in mind that workplace culture and employee engagement go together. The latter drives motivation, and the former delivers appropriate workplace hygiene according to the Two-Factor Theory of Herzberg. It’s important to use these effective strategies to enhance the workplace culture:
Collect regular employee feedback and act on the results
The employee engagement software can help you gain insights necessary to improve the workplace culture and help you make your employees feel that they are being heard and valued.
Actively discourage nepotism and preferential treatment for any type of group
Employees need to see the organization being fair, be it in the rate of pay for the job done or opportunities offered. An unfair workplace will never encourage an employee to excel at his / her job.
Make collaboration a part of the company culture
An individualistic work culture discourages the formation of a positive work environment. Encourage teams to collaborate and provide valuable contributions.
Communicate with clarity
Allow leaders and employees to communicate freely with one another. Encourage a culture of growth, openness, and constructive feedback.
Provide autonomy to employees
Managers have a lot of responsibility where one mistake could put them at risk. That can make them into micromanagers who may tend to eliminate team members’ autonomy while heavily scrutinizing them. Managers must understand how they can work more effectively with their teams to minimize mistakes as much as possible while avoiding becoming micromanagers by trusting their team.
Why should you use employee engagement software?
To give employees a better sense of belonging
An employee performance tool offers helpful portals to managers and employees to encourage interaction with one another.
To help managers measure employee engagement
The software provides evidence to support claims on an employee’s performance. Managers can use it to make reports and analyze data to make informed decisions.
To prioritize recognition
Employee engagement software can put more emphasis on recognizing employees so that they can be rewarded or acknowledged accordingly.
To implement and create a strategy for intervention
With enough data, managers can determine the least engaged employees and the reasons for it. They can use that information to create and implement helpful intervention strategies to resolve the issues.
Do it right
Invest in the right employee performance tool. Trusted by 2000+ businesses worldwide, AssessTEAM is an easy-to-use and reliable cloud-based employee performance management program that offers employee engagement tools and provides data-driven insights for effective performance monitoring.
Request a free demo today to discover how AssessTEAM can help boost employee engagement in your organization.