How to increase Employee Engagement- Being v/s Becoming

If you are an HR manager, a People’s manager or basically anyone responsible for improving human engagement in your organisation then we are sure you would have googled this question pretty often with a gazillion articles popping up. While there are millions and millions of strategies that we can implement to keep our staff more engaged, we think that may be a slight change in perspective is all we need to make our strategies work.

A thing to remember is that employees are people, people who love to grow not as employees but as a person. Helping people in a business to be more engaged varies as every person works differently. If you have ever studied consumer socialisation, you may have come across a point by a scholar named Qvortop, who explored childhood and felt children should be called ‘human becomings’ rather than ‘human beings’ due to continuous development.

However even after childhood, people are still developing in all areas of their life at different paces. Therefore, why shouldn’t this be the case at work? If all of us as a race are constantly evolving and ‘becoming’ someone then why limit our growth and opportunities? Why stop our learning as human beings just because we are too busy just ‘being’?

At TPL Experiences, it is our constant endeavour to challenge conventional norms and develop innovative engagement and training to increase human engagement, not just with each other but with themselves too.

So here we are with our top five strategies that managers can potentially implement at their workplace-

1- Frequent in-house activities-

Having frequent in-house activities such as quality circle meetings should not only have to be ways to improve work culture. These activities should discuss the betterment of people as a whole, like hearing about your team’s personal passions and hobbies. This can help make your team more comfortable with each other. This in turn helps build better relationships that often results in improving confidence among staff

2- Consider the employee’s other commitments 

Relating back to the ‘human becoming’ concept, it is important to realise your employee’s have other commitments and to be supportive of their life outside the workplace. For example, some businesses have free tutoring sessions or aftercare for employees with children. This helps the employees to be less stressed about organising activities for their children and in turn improving mental strength and leading to increased levels of engagement. 

3-  Give more opportunities for your employees to showcase their leadership skills

Another great way to facilitate continuous growth is to be mindful about passing on opportunities to lead to everyone in the team. A really easy way to do this is to encourage your team to attend and facilitate talks at Industry conferences and events. Rather than making this a purely senior leadership responsibility, allowing your staff at all levels to show up and speak up is a great way to increase employee commitment and confidence. This is again building on the ‘human becoming’ concept as the employee is not just trapped to the confines of their job description and is given plenty of opportunity to learn and grow.

4-   Single them out, in a good way

Your employees are going to always value personal interactions no matter how small they are. And while it is not always easy to write personalised notes to employees these days, personalisation and face-to-face communication is and will always remain important. Being present and there for your team can make a massive difference because people love engaging with people. We as humans have a knack of picking up on non-verbal cues and feeling a sense of belonging with even a quick face-face chat.

5-   Encourage engagement by offering chances to enhance skills for the job 

It is vital to provide training for all areas and for specific career-related areas as well. However, these should be tailor-made enjoyable training experiences and not made to be a mandatory exercise for employees to participate. This will show that the managers recognise the best ways in which their employees can learn new skills and are supportive of their aspirations. Looking at their personal requirements to learn and develop can definitely have a huge positive impact on your staff’s productivity.

It is important to understand that a simple pause and reset button can be the thing that makes or breaks your human engagement strategy. It is not always about doing different things, it can be only about doing things differently.

TPL Experiences develops and delivers personalised employee engagement and confidence strategies. We can help achieve engagement through tailored consultations and feedback sessions that can improve employee confidence, wellbeing, recognition and engagement. Here is a link to our latest employee programs- click here and feel free to reach us if you would like to have a free no-obligation chat around your organisation’s human resource strategies.

This blog is curated by Grace Welcome who has recently joined us as a Social Media executive.