Employee activation encourages your team members to authentically create, share, and engage with content that includes their insights regarding the industry or what is accomplished at your company. Allowing employees to share their passions and knowledge will let them know that their opinions matter and that they are valued as employees.
There are numerous benefits of employee activation, including improved communication and building a foundation of trust. Since the drastic shift to remote or hybrid work that began in 2020, research has consistently supported that communication is a significant indicator of productivity and success. According to Expert Market, 86% of both employees and executives report poor communication is the catalyst for workplace failures, with productivity increasing by 25% when improved. And most significantly, 97% of employees believe that communication impacts their day-to-day task efficacy.
As an employer, you must focus on three steps that will encourage employee activation within your company:
Employee Experience
It is of utmost importance that you create an employee experience consistent with the company’s brand. This includes the company culture & values, the technology environment, and the workspace environment. For example, suppose you emphasize the importance of flexibility. In that case, you must also extend this ideology to your team members, allowing them to work online some days, giving time off, and extending deadlines when needed.
It is important to remind ourselves that employee experience also includes clear lines of communication, outlined expectations and goals, as well as making their work environment accessible. This means that in order for your company to see growth, your employees must have a motivating and engaging work experience that accommodates their needs.
To learn more about the importance of internal flexibility, read here: Our Secret to Happiness and Productivity is Flexibility.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is arguably the core element of success for your company’s productivity. Gallup, a leader in employee engagement research, has indicated through its data that employee engagement predicts a 10% increase in customer loyalty, an 18% increase in productivity, and a 23% increase in profitability.
In order to begin improving engagement, invest in tracking employee engagement via digital polls and surveys. These routes for submitting feedback would be useful for finding ways to improve the work environment you have created to ensure that employees have the necessary tools to complete their work and that they are passionate about what they do. Most importantly to achieve this, you must facilitate a space where you can count on your team members to provide feedback. Whether it is recognizing a job well done or offering considerate critiques of the work, a culture of feedback is critical for engaging employees. With research presented by the Brandon Hall Group, it is important to highlight that a culture of recognition is likely to increase employee engagement by 2.5x and employee retention by 3x. As a company, you must make changes based on your employees’ feedback; otherwise, employee activation may take a step back.
Performance Management
Performance management focuses on the amount of work your employees are creating within a time frame as well as the level of quality. Address performance management in your company by offering incentives, benefits, and words of encouragement to achieve the highest level of performance from your team.
While we have separated employee activation into multiple parts, we also want to acknowledge the overlap between each of these steps to achieve employee activation. In order for your company to see successes, you must be able to maintain a healthy balance between performance management, employee engagement as well as employee experience. If your performance is decreasing and the turnover-rate is on the rise, it may be because one of those three steps is critically under-resourced.