Contributed article in our business series. Enjoy! – Kimberly
Employee engagement is a critical aspect of any successful business. An engaged employee will deliver far more than that of a disengaged one, and a team that can work well in collaboration achieves much more than those who work in silos. Some businesses make the regrettable mistake of not investing in the engagement of their employees. As a consequence, not only does this impact the level of productivity, it also will often result in a higher turnover in staff. Recruitment costs can be significantly more than employers appreciate, and therefore spending some extra budget on employee engagement is considered to be money well spent if it reduces turnover.
There are many different ways to keep employees engaged from direct pay benefits to setting up a recognition scheme for employees who have been identified by their peers for their efforts. Many large companies have an internal communications team that will develop employee engagement strategies that cover a number of significant areas.
One such area is Leadership and how employees perceive their leaders. If the leaders at the company don’t have much time to spend amongst the ‘shop floor’ so to speak, then employees can find it hard to relate to the leader. In turn, this impacts the level of engagement that they feel towards the company. One way of helping to break this down without the leaders being taken away from meetings or the day-to-day demands of their jobs, is by setting up regular video recordings or podcasts for employees to listen to.
These work particularly well if businesses are split across multiple locations, to ensure that each employee at each location is getting the same messages from leadership. It provides consistency and brings a unified approach to employee communications. These are factors that play heavily in overall engagement levels, which you will see if your company completes an employee engagement survey.
Videos and podcasts are incredibly easy to create these days. A 5-minute video message can be recorded quickly using just the camera on a laptop, and if there are key messages to be cascaded, your virtual address will add a lot of impact to the messages than sending a generic email. You might be surprised at how many employees feel that regular interaction with leaders is highly important to them.
Another popular way of cascading messages from leaders is to record a podcast, a quick 10-minute message maybe every fortnight to talk about key priorities and give employees a business update. Or maybe there is a regular meeting featuring topics that are related to engagement that could be recorded and shared with the employees that were unable to attend the meeting.
It is truly easy to record sound through a laptop, smartphone or even webex system and upload onto SoundCloud to share. You may even find podcasts are a great marketing tool and wish to create content for your customers or even clients. If so, and you want to increase the interest in the content, just buy SoundCloud likes and watch your video’s popularity soar and reach greater audiences.
Technology has made it easy to improve so many areas of employee engagement. If you are looking for some new ideas then maybe you need to try out some of these.
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