The Cohesive Workplace: How to Engage Employees and Boost Performance During Our Most Challenging Times

Employee engagement is important for their wellbeing and job satisfaction but it's not only about your staff. Studies show that companies with highly-engaged employees outperform less engaged companies by over 200 percent. With recent events, it may be some time yet before we truly see the second and third order consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and how important the efforts of your teams response has been to the success of organisations through this. What we do know is that the resilience of your teams to pull together can have a big impact on survival and growth. But what can you do to increase cohesiveness of teams? Let's look at how to engage employees to make a better workplace for everyone.

Employee engagement comes down to how motivated your employees are to do their jobs and how invested they are in making the company successful.

Staff engagement means they're committed to the company and have emotional connections with their co-workers. They want the company to succeed as much as they want to take home a pay cheque.

Team cohesion on the other hand, happens when a team remains united while working to achieve a common goal. Being a cohesive team means that not only are group goals met but everyone feels like they have contributed to the overall success of the group.Your employees likely have ideas for ways to streamline processes, improve agility, create new products, and various other things that can help your business grow.

Let them flex those creative muscles. How? First of all, make it a common goal to innovate. Provide them time to work on their ideas during normal business hours, not only when they can eke out a few extra minutes. If you want to be really innovative, empower them to work on these projects as often as possible. For example, Google encourages its employees to spend 20 percent of their time on side projects.

This flexibility can help them stay more engaged with their primary work and bring forward newer ideas to that primary work from the added creative expression they're doing on the side.

Giving your employees ample opportunities to collaborate with their coworkers will help them build relationships and feel more engaged with the company as a whole.

It's not only about their coworkers though. Look for ways to cross-pollinate your project teams to bring people together from different parts of the company.

When a group of employees from the same department or division forms a team, they tend to approach a problem from the same perspective. Bringing people in from other parts of the company can widen the team's circle of competence.

Employees will be more engaged when they feel supported in the work they're doing. There are various ways to provide support:

• Training and coaching for both learning new skills and maintaining existing ones
• Diversity and inclusion
• Peer coaching and feedback
• Providing employee voice through upward feedback

Employee wellbeing is also important. Their job is only one part of their life and things that are happening outside the workplace will have an effect on their work.

Providing flexibility in working hours, work location, and other aspects of your employees' jobs will help them manage the outside stresses in their life. Those benefits will reflect back on the work they're doing for you.

These ideas for how to engage employees are a good starting point but ultimately, you need to listen to what your employees are asking for. Their feedback will give some of the most valuable insights into how to improve.

Getting feedback can be challenging though. Methods such as surveys and pulse questions can be too constrictive and when used too much, lead to fatigue. GetHerd lets your employees share feedback through their mobile or desktop devices and align both the organisations goals to what is most important to them. Get in touch today to request an online demo today.