Employee engagement levels can have an impact on every avenue of a business. Poorly engaged workforces can cost you thousands in lost productivity and damage your consumer brand too. Highly engaged employees will show organisational loyalty, increase output and act as willing brand ambassadors.

Engaged employees are happier, they work harder and provide a better experience for customers and clients too. So if your management goal for 2019 is to boost the engagement levels of your teams, here are three simple wins to get the ball rolling.

Show a little appreciation

One of the quickest and easiest employee engagement-boosting strategies is to simply show some appreciation for your staff.

Your employees work hard every day, month to month, year to year. But especially with younger team members from the millennial and Gen Z groups, actually getting regular hits of appreciation along the way area really valued and appreciated.

In fact, there’s enough research to suggest that not recognising employees at all can be the fatal flaw in your management and HR strategy.

Numerous studies have found that a lacking appreciation is the top reason your employees will leave your company, or at the very least be browsing the job boards scouting out potential opportunities to jump ship.

Employees that feel recognised are more engaged with their jobs, so pausing for 10 minutes every day to go and show a little gratitude to some deserving team members is 10 minutes well spent.

Celebrate achievements…

… both inside of work and out.

This is a really quick win but a great way to make sure your staff are recognised - and a great way to motivate the wider workforce too.

Publically recognising achievements, either in a meeting or by giving attention to something in the office, is a really powerful way to show employee recognition.

But you don’t just have to recognise internal achievements. Celebrating external goals such as an employee raising money for charity, completing a certain sports challenge or even bigger things like a new engagement are all great ways to show your staff you actually care about them and their lives and spread a little joy around the office too.

Allow flexibility in how your employees want to work

Whilst I admit it’s going to be tough to allow staff who work in production or other regimented industries to be flexible in how they work (beyond offering flexible working hours), offering some kind of flexibility can have huge benefits on employee engagement levels.

And what I’m really talking about here is allowing staff to work in a quiet space should they choose, or even work from home on certain days of the week or if they need to really focus and meet a deadline, or to offer a little relief from a stressful daily commute.

Especially in the creative and tech worlds, and any large offices where open-plan layouts have been adopted, many employees can struggle to focus from the literally hundreds of potential distractions. And it’s difficult to engage with a task if you can hear a conversation from the other side of the room about planning where to go for lunch.

So offer some flexibility as to where and how your employees can work. In fact, 75% of workers in one study said they’re more productive when they work from home for precisely the above reason.

So, by saying ‘no problem’ to your copywriter when they ask if they can work the afternoon at the neighbouring coffee shop, so long as they’re completing their work and they’re not required internally for a meeting, why not?

If productivity increases and staff feel like you’re listening to and trusting them, engagement levels in the job itself will increase.

How is your organisation planning to boost employee engagement levels this year? Let me know in the comments below!