5 Ways to Motivate and Engage Your Employees

Engaging staff not only makes work more satisfying, but it is also more cost-effective.

In the following 5 points, we will explain why you might want to involve your workers and how to do it. Enjoy!

 

1. Why is it beneficial and who is responsible?

A study from Aon Hewitt analysed global trends in staff engagement and discovered two things which come up often in the best-performing businesses:

  • strategies aimed at enhancing talent are intimately connected with business; and
  • leadership and staff engagement are essential for success.

The research revealed that, statistically, there is a strong positive correlation between staff engagement and financial performance. To be more specific, it showed that by increasing engagement by 5%, revenue increased by 3%. The managers of these businesses realised that staff engagement is one of their more important tasks.

2. How to businesses increase staff engagement?

Eric Flamholtz, professor emeritus at UCLA Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles, explains in this article that engagement can vary tremendously, from completely engaged to completely disengaged.

Someone who is completely engaged has the following characteristics:

  • Identifies with the organisation
  • Motivation to protect the organisation
  • Motivation to participate in reaching business targets
  • Taking pleasure in successes of the business, being disappointed in its failures
  • Seeing an attack on the organisation as an attack on themselves

Someone who is completely disengaged shows the polar opposite characteristics to those aforementioned: they don’t identify, they aren’t motivated, and they are indifferent to the successes of and attacks on the organisation. From this analysis, it can be seen that staff engagement is an asset. What can you do grow this investment?

You can increase the level of engagement by improving these factors:

  • Leaders’ behaviour
  • Systems promoting performance and incentives
  • Company values and culture

These factors have a direct influence on engagement and can usually be controlled by the business.

Engagement also depends on certain environmental factors, like:

  • Openness to change and innovation policies
  • Quality of internal communication
  • Accurate business planning
  • Transparency in decision-making
  • Effect inter-departmental coordination

These factors can influence the working atmosphere which, in turn, has an impact on the engagement of individuals.

3. An effective tool for rewarding staff: welfare

Rewarding workers with a welfare plan has a double advantage. The first is economic, thanks to the Italian Stability Law of 2016, rewarding a worker with a €1000 prize costs the business €1000. Previously, the prize would have been considered a salary increase and would be taxed as such; the business would have paid nearly double.

The second advantage consists of improving the working atmosphere and thus having an influence on the environmental factors which affect engagement and staff productivity. Now more than ever, it is advantageous to create a company welfare plan based on promoting results and updating business processes.

Equal engagement of workers is a tool implemented through organisational schemes which directly and actively engage workers in the improvement of working life, innovation processes and business performance, with gains in efficiency and productivity.

 

4. With a welfare system, you can attract and retain talent

A study sponsored by Zurich Italia and carried out by SWG analysed the advantages of employee benefits in terms of productivity and competitivity in Italian businesses. The research showed that companies which invest in a welfare system benefit from a boost in staff productivity and an increase in talent retention. You can more details here.

 

5. I need to train staff to engage them in growing challenges

According to a study by Polimi, the organisational challenge which 52% of businesses viewed as a priority was managing digital innovation. Thankfully, the majority of businesses were aware of the need to change their own working methods.

As David Rose, author of the best seller Angel Investing, said: “Any company designed for success in the twentieth century is doomed to failure in the twenty-first.”

Cultural change is the first necessary step if you want to survive in this century, starting from the knowledge that, to compete in an interconnected world, people need to be trained in using new digital tools.

Organisations such as Confindustria are succeeding. Find out how they do it!

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We have created a newsletter with the aim of inspiring you with food for thought and concrete tools to enable you to actively involve your employees in organisational processes.

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