By guest author: Josh Fechter – Josh is the co-founder and CEO of Squibler. He’s written five books and thousands of blog posts. Forbes noted him as one of “12 Innovative Founders To Watch And Learn From“.
Maintaining employee engagement is important when businesses want to retain their employees. It offers them an environment that makes them excited to go to work every day and be productive.
In fact, employee engagement is so important that every department needs to get involved. There are many ways to help employees stay focused on work so that the company runs more efficiently and is as profitable possible.
Human Resources is one of the key players in making the work environment a positive experience for the company’s employees. If you want to know how to engage employees through your HR department, look at these ways that the department can make important contributions.
Hire Based on Culture Fit
When people fit within a culture, they’re more likely to enjoy working with each other. This doesn’t mean that all of your employees need to have the same personalities and assets. In fact, great teams are made up of people who have completely different traits to offer.
However, the people that you hire should have similar values when it comes to teamwork and group interactions. They should support the product or service that your company makes. You want to hire people who complement each other in their skills, but you also want to hire people who have personality characteristics and values that will complement each other.
HR can help the company through this process by having a clear idea of which characteristics that the company values in job candidates and by helping management pick out the people who most closely exemplify those qualities.
Maintaining Culture
It’s common for businesses to lose focus on where they want the company culture to go when they hire many people all at once.
There are also instances in which it’s HR’s job to mitigate tensions between employees to maintain a positive culture. When you have a period of time in which you hire a lot of people, your company culture is fragile throughout the onboarding process.
The first few months that the employees are working there are rocky because they’re still learning about the company and its processes. You can maintain the culture that you have set forth by having a thorough onboarding process and ensuring that new employees know that HR is always available to answer questions.
Human Resources also needs to continue to be a resource and a place where people can go to work through problems. Unresolved conflict can significantly disrupt the quality of the work environment, which will cause employees to disengage.
Communication of Values
Maintaining a company culture starts with communicating the values of the company to its employees. The managers of various departments have many goals and tasks that they need to complete, and their minds might be focused on significantly different problems.
Moreover, it’s entirely possible for managers to lose sight of the company values altogether. That’s why Human Resources needs to take responsibility for maintaining the values.
This starts with teaching new hires about the company, but it goes further than that. HR should also be ensuring that the culture is maintained by continually promoting the values through programs designed to educate employees and create opportunities for growth.
Recognize Achievements
Human Resources is also a department that can recognize achievements from its employees. HR can work with managers of different departments to identify which employees went above and beyond to help their coworkers or complete an important project.
Recognizing employees shows them that the company cares about them. It also gives other employees something to strive for because, without recognition, employees can feel like their efforts go unnoticed.
Offer Feedback
The HR department can also offer feedback in areas that involve need improvement within a department for an individual. Most employees that are worth having greatly appreciate feedback because it lets them know what they can work on and what they’re doing well.
Like recognition, it also lets them know that someone is paying attention to their efforts.
Create Incentives
There are many ways that the HR department can create incentives that will promote a positive work culture and improve employee engagement. They can offer giveaways for meeting goals or put on group outings when an entire department does well.
Most people want to go to a work environment that offers more than a paycheck every two weeks. They want to feel like they’re moving forward, so it’s the company’s job to ensure that there are plenty of opportunities for employees to experience the fruits of their labor.
Offer Support
One of the main jobs of HR is to offer support to employees whether they’re related to an employee’s personal matters or work dynamics. HR should make sure that they understand how they can help employees in various situations and how they can communicate to employees that they’re there to offer assistance when needed.
Human Resources plays a vital role in the achievements of the company, and the department can play an important role in improving employee engagement.
HR Should Not Neglect Employee Engagement
Employee engagement decreases turnover rates and absenteeism and makes employees more excited to go to work. This makes them more productive, as well.
Human Resources professionals that are interested in finding ways to maximize employee potential can find many resources for developing themselves with this HRCI certification review.
Thank you for the information and thank you for sharing it with us, Best Regards.