Do Your 2021 Business Goals Include Your Employees?

Your employees are the backbone of your organization and when they’re fully engaged, your bottom-line benefits. Make people a priority in 2021 by adding an employee engagement strategy to your new year’s resolutions.

Did you know that employee satisfaction correlates directly to higher profits and an enhanced brand? Engaged workers—individuals who are happy in their jobs and with their organization—are more productive, have lower turnover and less absenteeism, and have better customer ratings. Highly engaged employees also benefit your business by serving as a great recruiting tool.

In any organization, it is important to realize that employee engagement is part of company culture and must be driven from the top down. Successful businesses have leaders who are actively engaged and who also serve as mentors to their staff. As a manager, you must first identify what engagement means to your organization before focusing on goals for improving it.

How do you determine what engages your employees? Ask them.

Employee engagement and satisfaction surveys can be valuable ways to discover what motivates your workers. From working environments, benefits, employee training, or development opportunities, results from employee satisfaction surveys can tell you exactly what your people want and need to feel valued and happy at your organization.

Another great way to understand what motivates your employees is to use a tool that objectively measures it. This tool helps uncover motivations that your employees may not even be aware of.

Once you know what keeps your workers engaged, your employee engagement strategy can start to take shape.

• Set actionable, observable, and measurable goals for enhancing engagement.

• Form a task force or have a member of the executive team focus on the employee engagement strategy and assign responsibility to specific goal items.

• Create a timeline for executing those goals and communicate deadlines to everyone involved.

By setting goals for your people practices in 2021, you can do much more than retain satisfied workers — you can also reduce your company’s cost, earn favor in the eyes of customers, and recruit the next generation of top talent.