As a business owner, you know improving employee engagement is important, but is it the secret sauce to business success? In a word, absolutely. Why? How about decreased turnover, happier employees, and a more concerted effort toward providing exceptional service? How would those outcomes improve your business?
At PerformanceScope, we understand the critical role employee engagement plays in any hospitality business. We also know that without the right feedback from your employees, efforts to improve engagement generally fall flat. So what can you do? Below, we’ve outlined effective strategies that can help you make your business a better place to work.
Conduct Employee Engagement Surveys
What if there was a surefire method of gathering relevant employee feedback? A tool that allowed you to collect anonymous data, which you could then use to improve your employee experience? Good news: That tool exists — it’s called an employee engagement survey. And if you use it to your advantage, it can help you seriously improve your employee experience.
According to Deloitte, a whopping 72% of millennials (who comprise a significant percentage of the hospitality workforce) feel their jobs do not allow them to use the full extent of their skillsets. When your staff feels underutilized, they also feel unengaged in their work, which ultimately leads to growing dissatisfaction and declining performance.
Clearly, this alarming statistic highlights the desperate need for employers to devote more time and energy to developing their staff, but without relevant feedback, that difficult to do. That’s where employee engagement surveys shine. Through anonymous surveys, you have the ability to:
● Track trends in employee engagement over time
● Decipher the factors that contribute to (or detract from) overall satisfaction and engagement in the workplace
● Gather valuable feedback that employees may not be willing to discuss in person
● Create a valuable communication channel between employees and management
● Identify areas of strength and opportunity in regard to training and employee resources
● Gather actionable insights that can help you reduce turnover, which hovered at an alarming 75% in 2019.
● Improve employee performance, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and your overall guest experience.
Keep in mind that your employees are the face of your business. If they’re not happy, your business flounders; however, if they enjoy contributing as part of an engaged staff, they become valuable brand ambassadors. Do you know how your employees truly feel about working for you? If not, our PerformanceScope team can help you find out!
How Can Data Boost Employee Engagement?
Gathering employee feedback is well and good, but after you’ve collected the data, what do you do with it? With employee engagement surveys, you’ll easily be capable of identifying strengths and opportunities regarding the factors that contribute to employee satisfaction.
Armed with the right data, you can clearly see where training might fall short, leadership may be lacking, performance expectations may not be clear, and developmental opportunities are failing. Once you know where you need to improve, you can then implement strategies to enhance engagement.
Effective Engagement-Boosting Strategies
Not sure how to get started with increasing your employee engagement? Start by visualizing the basic hierarchy of human needs: physiological needs; safety and security; love and belonging; self-esteem, and self-actualization. For employees to reach the highest level of engagement — self-actualization — their lower-level needs must first be met. To achieve that, try implementing these tactics:
● Clear communication. Employees need to feel well informed about what's going on in the organization to feel engaged in the bigger picture. They must feel confident that their leaders will provide an open communication channel where they feel safe and secure in expressing their concerns.
● Express the overall vision. For employees to feel engaged, your big-picture vision must resonate with their values — they must feel connected to a common goal. When your overall vision truly motivates your employees, their performance improves.
● Provide resources. Do your employees have access to the resources and tools they need to perform their jobs to the best of their ability? When staff members don’t feel they have access to the things they need to perform great work, their confidence in their abilities suffers. As well, their confidence in management's ability to successfully lead diminishes. Providing open access to resources and ongoing learning opportunities helps your staff members feel confident in their growth, development, and contribution to the business.
● Give recognition. To increase employee engagement, staff must feel as though their contributions matter to the overall success of the company. When an employee performs well, openly recognize that person for their contribution. Failing to praise staff members for their hard work essentially communicates a lack of appreciation, which does nothing for employee morale.
Ready to Improve Your Employee Engagement? Contact PerformanceScope Today
At PerformanceScope, we help business operators improve their customer experience and employee engagement through the undeniable power of data. Our custom surveys help you gather relevant feedback from both staff members and patrons, which we then transform into actionable insights that help your business thrive. Ready to learn more about how we can help you boost your business’s performance? Get in touch with our team today for more information or click here to test drive PerformanceScope for free!