5 Tips to Boost Employee Engagement

This may come as a bit of a surprise, but at any given time less than one-third of your employees are actively engaged at work.

To put it simply, when employees aren’t engaged, they’re just not that concerned with their performance or invested in the future success of your company, which can have a major impact on your business. Lack of employee engagement can negatively affect day to day operations, stunt your company’s growth and even put your workers’ safety at risk.

Here are five strategies that employers, managers, and supervisors should consider to increase employee engagement and improve safety performance:

Provide ongoing training for your employees

Ensuring your employees are equipped with the necessary training to be successful and safe on the job is critical. If employees are not properly trained or if their training has lapsed, they’re not being set up for success and their safety could be at risk. Leading companies take a proactive approach to training management by ensuring their employees’ training certifications are always up-to-date, and regularly research additional training courses that could be of value to their workforce.

Invest in your employees’ future growth

Employers that invest in the continued growth and development of their workforce are more successful and retain employees longer than their peers. Ensuring there are ample growth opportunities for your workforce not only motivates, inspires and increases engagement, it also helps contribute to the long-term success of your organization.

Facilitate two-way communication between head office and field workers

Managers and supervisors must communicate a clear vision of success for the company as a whole as well as for each department. This vision should include what the goals are, why they are important and how they can best be achieved. To ensure progress is being made, employees should be regularly reporting on safety KPIs and sharing performance dashboards with management. This allows for new insights to be uncovered and can spark new conversations between management and employees, which helps to boost engagement.

Recognize your employees

It’s no secret that companies with more engaged employees have less incidents and injuries, but employee recognition remains an overlooked component to building an engaged workforce. Even a simple thank you from a manager to a field worker can go a long way to boost morale and employee engagement. Companies should also consider the use of incentive programs to reward good work and behavior-based safety. Ultimately, recognition helps to positively reinforce safe behavior and foster engagement.

Collect and implement employee feedback for continuous improvement

Engaged employees want to know that their input matters and that they are directly contributing to the success of the organization. Employers should regularly survey their employees for feedback and suggestions for improvement. Failure to involve employees in critical decision-making processes or neglecting to implement their ideas for continuous improvement can ultimately make for an at-risk, checked out workforce.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared on Safeopedia.