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Planning Is How Employee Engagement Succeeds

Few things in business are successful without proper planning

Most of your work may seem like it’s spent planning and forecasting, and there’s a good reason for that. When we plan, we can foresee potential pitfalls and setbacks and figure out a workaround for them. Planning gives us a clear roadmap to our goals. If we don’t take the time to plan for success, then we’re more likely to give up when we should just go about it differently. The same is true for employee engagement.

How engaged are your employees?

With surveys, you can figure out what your employee engagement looks like and what is working to engage them. You can’t plan for better engagement without knowing what you’re already doing that’s working or not working.

You can usually determine what’s working and what’s not by observing your employee’s attitudes to specific tasks and feedback. Typically, employees are more engaged when they feel they’re valued, so if you have any programs that add value to their lives and their work in place, consider how your employees react to these things and plan to expand them.

Don’t take on too much

Don’t revamp your entire company at once. It’s OK to make employee engagement a slower process because then your attention is only focused on certain points, and you can give more attention to them.

It’s also a good idea to delegate projects and programs to team leaders so they can help in the development process for their employees. Since they work with them more, they could really help give you insight into what their team would like most and what would benefit their engagement. Once you have these few areas ironed out, and engagement is higher, then you can move on to other focuses.

A good way to figure out which areas you should tackle first is by considering which ones will give you the best results. Pull the big levers first before you start pulling the smaller ones. The big levers are the ones that will create the most significant change to your business.

Feedback is key

Not only should your managers give feedback to their employees regularly to help them improve, but they should also give feedback on how the employee engagement plan is coming together, how the program is going over with specific employees, and what can be done to improve the plan and the program. Not every program will work wonders right out of the gate, but with refinement, a good plan can become great engagement.

Meet with employees regularly

Just as you’re getting feedback on plans and projects from your managers, it’s a good idea to have frequent company meetings where you can hear your employees and get feedback from them on how well the company and the management is doing. This is the perfect time to learn firsthand what is and isn’t working for them and figure out what needs to change or improve to make your employees happier and more engaged.

Prepare yourself for honesty

When you open the doors to listen to employee feedback, you should be prepared to hear positive and negative reviews. While it’s natural to feel defensive when we hear something negative that we don’t want to hear, it’s important to remember that hearing the negative is going to help you prepare your company for greater change and better engagement.

Employee engagement isn’t something that happens overnight, but it is something that can happen with careful thought and planning. If you’re looking for more ways you can improve employee engagement, look through our blog for some more great tips and advice!