Creating a Culture of Enthusiasm to Improve Employee Engagement

Be Enthusiastic for Employee Engagement

Employee engagement if often one of the most overlooked aspects of business management. Indeed, while there has always been a heavy emphasis on keeping customers interested in interacting with the business, there is often no talk of how to keep employees themselves enthusiastic about what they are doing. And this is definitely not going to be good, as employees’ lack of enthusiasm will undoubtedly affect their performance. So, how do you bring back their interest?

Understanding employee concerns

One of the most common reasons why employees lose interest in what they are doing is when they feel that their voices are not heard by the higher ups. Here, it would be best for businesses to take initiative and make it a policy to continuously listen to employee concerns and comments.

A simple means to get employee pulse is to create survey and comment forms. Make this a weekly practice before closing shop. Of course, you need to commit yourself to actually reading these forms to get a better grasp of your employee’s issues and suggestions. With this in place, employees will feel more at ease knowing that their sentiments reach the management.

 Creating an engaging work environment

Of course, ensuring that your people have a voice within the company is just the first step of improving employee engagement. As pointed out by Collin Shaw, true employee interest and engagement in the work at hand really shows when there is a certain emotional attachment to their work. And undoubtedly the best way to create that feeling is by making the work fun.

Creating a game-like atmosphere at work is a great way of introducing the element of fun. Make a list of goals that you want to be met within a certain amount of time and challenge your crew to see if they can do it. To retain that fun factor, the goals you set should be fairly feasible to accomplish. Also, remember to keep this as more of a friendly contest between your employees, and not have them being too obsessed with it. There’s a lot of reading you can do on enterprise gamification here on Gamification Co

Maintaining a culture of enthusiasm

Going further, for it to really work out in the long run, your employees need to adopt this new culture of enthusiasm. For that, you need to get the right people to lead them. As advised by Robyn Relly:

“The best managers understand that their success and that of the organization relies on employees’ achievements. But not everyone can be a great manager. Great managers care about their people’s success. They seek to understand each person’s strengths and provide employees with every opportunity to use their strengths in their role. Great managers empower their employees, recognize and value their contributions, and actively seek their ideas and opinions.”

And it ultimately ends with you. Don’t look at this effort to create a culture of enthusiasm as simply a means of increasing your profits. You yourself need to embrace it. And you have to pass employee engagement down your crew naturally.

Cover Image by CarbonNYC