Growing your team’s productivity:
How to increase employee engagement

Positive employee engagement from the first day of work

Focus on a great onboarding program where all the essential parts of learning the job, getting to know the organisation, and becoming a part of the company culture are all parts of the overall package! Employee engagement starts from day 1. New employees are likelier to be firing on all cylinders from the first day of work if they are updated and included on all levels!

If you’re in search of inspiration, you can also read our blog post about how your company can build a great onboarding program for international candidates.

Play to their strengths

Growth in employee engagement comes from playing to your employees’ strengths! It’s almost impossible to organise a team where everyone only has tasks they’re good at and have an interest in but sometimes it doable. However, that can be one of your leadership pillars, where you always aim to structure the group according to everyone’s strengths. 

Playing to your employees’ strengths is just a small part of how you can keep your employees happy. Be sure to check out what other initiatives you can implement!

Provide means for training and development

Professional development and growth is an essential factor in the employment cycle. Most, if not all, people want to develop and improve their skills to become better or more effective at their jobs. If they can’t grow or improve their skills at their current workplace, they will most likely look for greener pastures. Make sure that you support their hunger for development and growth.

Signalling to potential employees that your company is a training ground for employees can be a powerful marketing tool when attracting candidates to the organisation. Read more about how you can strengthen your employer brand to attract top talent to your company!

Encourage a social workplace

We believe that fantastic results come from a healthy workplace culture built on social interactions between all employees. You likely already have at least one social event once a year, or maybe you have one each Friday - That’s great for everyone involved! Giving that platform to engage and socialise to your employees will enhance their working relationships as well as giving them more ownership over the workplace culture.

In any case, inviting everybody to, e.g. a yearly summer event allows everyone to grow a social network that goes beyond frontend development and UX design!

Be available and give feedback

Don’t hide in your office and only provide input during the yearly review. Show your employees that although you’re their manager, you’re at their service if they have any concerns or want to ask you for or about critical things. In turn, by giving frequent feedback to the team and individually, you can entail this communication loop between you and your employees! 

The feedback process makes way for a healthier and stronger boss-employee relationship while boosting employee engagement. Humans are driven by getting acknowledgement, so make sure to give credit when credit is due!

Reward great results

With great rewards comes high productivity! As mentioned earlier in the article, humans like the acknowledgement for their work, and they love prizes. Rewards can be financial or gestures of some form. If the whole company has performed well over the year, you can throw a company party or event or even payout bonuses to your employees.

You can also integrate a reward structure in the contracts, where fulfilling specific KPIs trigger a monetary bonus (the usual standard being one month’s salary). There are various ways to structure such deals, whether it’s a financial bonus, an extra week of vacation, or stocks in the company.

Allow for growth

Make it known that your company allows for professional growth: that you hire and promote from within. When people see that it’s possible to advance internally, it reduces the risk of losing talented individuals, which also means reduced cost of recruiting replacements. There are other ways of making sure that you can retain your employees, which we explore in our blog post about employee retention!

Next time you’re looking to hire a Senior Frontend Developer, you could evaluate your current team of developers. Maybe there’s someone there who’s ready to take the next step in their career!

Providing an excellent platform for your employees to prosper will grow engagement and productivity, which can result in better products and services as well as better results. Happy and engaged employees are also less likely to jump ship, which means that you have a foundation of loyal workers who are expected to stay for years to come!