8 Ways HR Directors Can Engage Their Employees in 2019

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Employee engagement is vital to organisational success. We all know this. And yet, we understand that it is harder than it might at first seem. There are a whole host of reasons as to why employees may feel disengaged with the organisation they are working for. With everything from office politics and work environment to salary expectations and career progression coming into play, it’s difficult to analyse what the reasons might be. Fortunately, we’ve collated together ten ways in which you might be able to engage your employees in 2019 – and most of them are very easy to implement!

1. Offer Flexible Working Hours
This one is so basic that we’re hoping you have already considered implementing it, even if you’ve not yet started offering it. Flexible working hours might be difficult to push up the chain of command and get sign-off on but even starting with a flexible scheme that allows employees to start work between 8am-10am and finish between 4pm-6pm is a good start. It’s easy to implement and giving employees that flexibility can instantly help to improve engagement.

2. Give Everyone a Career Plan
Employee engagement is driven by a huge number of factors. A big consideration is the future. If your employees have a career plan and can see that path to promotions and greater responsibility it will instantly open the doors to further engagement. Make sure you and your managers are offering everyone within the company (at every level) a clear career plan for the future.

3. Set Goals, Targets and Objectives
This should be a no-brainer but it’s amazing how many companies and organisations fail to get the basics right. Set goals, targets, objectives (whatever you wish to call them) that are realistically achievable, every-day actionable and motivating to employees. It’s simple and effective.

4. Reward Successes – 5 Minutes a Week
Make sure you are getting your managers to spend 5 minutes a week reviewing the successes of their teams (however small) and then reacting to that with rewards. There are lots of organisations that reward success well. On the flip-side, there are a huge number of organisations out there that focus on improving the negatives and aren’t very good at rewarding the successes. These rewards could be financial incentive schemes, employee awards or part of bigger successes. Even having a department head sending a ‘well done’ email can be hugely motivating. Don’t skip this one!

5. Check the Environment
We understand that office space is expensive, and we can’t all have offices like Google (with their slides, sleep pods and fields) but it’s important to check what sort of office space you’re using and make the most of it. Even a lick of paint, a popcorn machine in one corner or bright branding on the walls can help. It doesn’t take much time or cost but sprucing up an office environment can really help improve employee engagement.

6. Offer Mentoring Schemes
As PushFar, it’s hardly surprising that somewhere in our article we would advocate mentoring schemes – they are what we do! But it’s true. Mentoring is a great way to really easily engage with your employees and help everyone with career progression and professional support. Mentoring schemes are easy to setup with our platform and unlike coaching you don’t have to pay coaching rates because your employees are the ones mentoring one-and-other. Click here to find out more about how we can help.

7. Talk Health and Wellbeing
It’s important to recognise that health and wellbeing are not just things that we should be thinking about on the weekends, in our evenings and on holiday. Health is vitally important to employee engagement and ultimately organisational success. Promote health, fitness and wellbeing by offering gym incentive schemes, bike-to-work options and wellbeing classes. Some companies are even investing in employee Yoga sessions – they’re a great, sociable and fun way to encourage wellbeing and can also improve employee networking, community and personal development.

8. Allow Home Working
Finally, to round of our top tips for employee engagement in the year ahead it would be wrong not to talk about working from home. It’s almost 2019, the technology does exist and working from home should definitely be something you allow your employees to do (depending on their role, of course). Almost every office job can be done from home at least once or twice a month. Give it a go – you are likely to find employee engagement increases and employees might even be more productive when they’re able to work from home! Some studies show that if people work from home they feel they must justify it and therefore productivity increases.

So, there you are – 8 ways to easily increase employee engagement in 2019. Remember, we’re here to help your company or organisation with employee mentoring, career progression and networking. Click here to find out how we might be able to help you!