Tag: Employee Engagement Activities

10 Employee Engagement Activities in Companies

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Employee engagement activities aren’t considered as important as they should be. But before you start crunching numbers and coming up with some new activities, know that employee engagement is essentially a mindset. The only way employee engagement activities can yield the desired result is if you keep your focus on the “why” of the issue.  

Don’t just look at the figures and statistics. Treat your employees with empathy because they are humans with their own ideas, thoughts, accomplishment, and problems. They are not just there to make money for your company, they are vital resources that need nurturing in order to deliver satisfactory results. 

Importance of Employee Engagement Activities 

The Importance of employee engagement activities can’t be overstated. They have time and again proven to:

    • Decrease staff turnover rate
    • Improve efficiency and productivity
    • Retain more customers 
    • Increase profits

Most importantly, engaged employees are obviously happier, both in their professional and personal life. Everything done with increased engagement has longlasting effects on the culture of the workplace. 

 

   See Also: Time Clock Apps for Multiple Employees

Purpose of Employee Engagement 

The main purpose of employee engagement is to attract and retain top talent. Recent research has shown that more than a quarter of employees is at a high risk of turnover. The most worrying part is that one-third of those at risk are talented employees that go above and beyond what’s expected of them. They are eligible for other positions. 

When competition is fierce and the cost of training new employees is sky-high, employee engagement activities become vital. Plus, these activities can directly increase the productivity of a team and take it to the next level. 

How to Engage Employees

Some of the top employee engagement activities include:

 

  • Involving Employees in Your Business Planning

Have a big meeting with all of your employees every six months or so. Tell them about the most important issues faced by your company and how you plan to address those issues. Take your team on board while making future plans, assessing opportunities, and refining pre-existing business strategies to suit your needs. 

 

  • Creating an Efficient Knowledge Sharing System

High employee turnover rate means inevitably results in the loss of essential information. One way to avoid it is by creating a kind of knowledge sharing system. It avoids extra cost to some degree and has proven to be a great engagement driver for new hires. 

We recommend implementing a mentorship program that pairs new employees with experienced ones. It will quickly get the new hires up to speed and help familiarize them with the working process of your company.  

 

  • Showing Them the Financial State of Your Company

Don’t hide your company’s financial record from your employees. Flaunt it and instill your employees with confidence. 

Give a quick presentation at the end of every year or quarter. Show them the fruits of everyone’s efforts, set ambitious goals for the next phase, explain how everyone involved can meet those goals. This eventually becomes a set of activities that keeps the employee engaged and full of purpose. 

 

  • Creating a Learning Environment

One of the main reasons why employees quit companies is a lack of learning opportunities. They claim that employers always demand more but don’t provide an environment that encourages growth. 

Make it easier for employees to access the required knowledge and development opportunities. 

 

  • Hyping Upcoming Opportunities

Get your employees excited about upcoming events. Let them know that opportunity is knocking on their door and they better grab it with both hands. You can communicate these opportunities in your internal newsletter, directly, or during the monthly meeting. 

If your employees are optimistic about your company’s future, they’ll ignore those poaching emails from other companies. 

 

  • Start Your Own Internal Magazine

Create a magazine focused solely on your employees. Fill the magazine with witty columns, news, stories, and opportunities. We’re sure that most of the staff will love to be featured on the cover as Employee of the Month. 

The magazine could be in online or print form. You can even go for both forms; a monthly online and a quarterly print issue. 

 

  • Encourage Individuals to Take Responsibility

Each and every employee is the hero of their own story. They need to carve out their own career path and set goals for themselves. 

Have your employees write their goals on a piece of paper. Tell them to put the paper in an envelope and seal it. After six months or so, give them the sealed envelopes to let the see if they’ve accomplished their goal. 

 

  • Always Give Back

Get involved with your local social and charitable initiatives. Giving back to your community helps you get in a positive mindset. It also cultivates pride and loyalty. 

Have your team pitch some causes and start supporting the one you feel most strongly about. Make it your personal mission and not just some hobby. Get your employees involved as well. Let them feel and know that they’re making a difference. 

 

  • Act on Employee Feedback

Listening to employee feedback is just part of the equation. You won’t be able to build any engagement without actually acting on said feedback and making the necessary changes. 

This doesn’t mean that you should act on feedback from all your employees. Prioritize feedback from your high-performing employees. If they feel like their voice isn’t being heard, they’ll most likely look for other opportunities. 

If you’re not sure who your high-performing employees are, use Staff Timer to monitor and receive daily intelligence reports on employee tasks and projects.  

 

  • Allow Personalization at the Workplace

When you depersonalize the workplace, you end up dehumanizing your employees. Encourage them to put some personalized items on their desks. Normalize diversity and inclusion. 

In short, create policies that accept different hairstyles and clothing options that reflect their individual beliefs and values. 

 

  See Also: Task Tracker

Key Takeaways

Employee engagement activities are absolutely worth their weight in gold. There are countless benefits of having engaged employees that believe in what they’re doing and look forward to their day. 

Always remember, satisfied employees means satisfied customers. 

How Entrepreneurs Can Stay Ahead of the Curve

As an entrepreneur, one of the most significant things you can accomplish for yourself is to set up a viable work-life balance.

When most people begin their business, they eat, sleep, and breathe work. From their life experience, they know the true value of hustle and diligence. Their whole focus is on creating something successful. In pursuit of success, they can let work consume their whole life.  

This will undoubtedly have an adverse effect on one’s health. Personal relationships become strained. The mind becomes restless and distracted. Many only seem to realize what their business needs have done to their health when it’s too late.

Balancing the needs of your business with your daily life is crucial to you and your business’s well-being. In this article, we are going to discuss four tips that can help entrepreneurs efficiently maintain a work-life balance.  

Plan Ahead

Protect your schedules and give importance to your time. It’s important to attentively plan meetings with clients and potential customers. Explain your need to give them your complete consideration and support. After that, offer suitable windows of time in which a meeting can take place.

Clients may assume that you don’t have other customers or commitments because your calendar is open for them—and so they may ask for rescheduling at the last minute or arrive late to meetings. If you don’t handle these matters delicately then they have the potential to affect your family time.

Take Time Off

It’s important to understand that enjoying your time away from work can help you remain focused while you’re at the workplace. It’s not about the number of hours you sit at your desk, it’s about the number of quality hours you spend at a task with your complete focus.

It takes numerous attempts to understand and acknowledge that getting some enjoyment out of your time off is useful for your mental well-being. Also, what’s good about running a successful business if you can’t take some time off and enjoy life?

Hire the Right People

Hire smart individuals who can efficiently maintain your business in your absence. It will allow you to take some days off and spend more time with your family. This is the reason why employing the right individuals is essential. Or else, you will end up sacrificing your own time to keep the business alive and eventually wear yourself out.

Structuring your work culture around a genuine faith in work-life balance will be tremendously beneficial in the long-run. 

Take advantage of tools

Tons of business-related services and tools are available online. Instead of trying to manually complete your tasks, look into apps that can help you automate and streamline your business. This saves time and money in the long-run. 

Make a list that includes all the must-have features that you would like from a tool. Carefully search the market once you’ve made the list. Look into apps that fit your budget. Make sure that they tick all or most of your boxes. 

To maintain a work-life balance, entrepreneurs need to cleverly utilize their time. Use time management apps, like Stafftimer, to keep track of employees and tasks.  

Stay Healthy

It’s hard to inspire and motivate others when you aren’t healthy. No matter what kinds of sales you’re bringing in, if you’re not taking care of your body, it won’t be sustainable. Put self-care at the top of your list. Exercise, get on a healthy diet and sleep 6-7 hours per day. 

These are just some ways with which entrepreneurs can balance their personal and professional life. In the end, it all depends on the individual. If a person doesn’t give importance to his/her personal relationships then there is no reason for him/her to maintain a work-life balance.

How Machine Learning is Predicting Buying Behavior

Being able to understand or predict consumer’s behavior has always been a crucial process for marketers. Everyone wants this kind of prediction, for obvious reasons. Today every marketer wants to target the right audience for his product. The infamous artificial intelligence has made this job much easier, specifically, the deep learning emergence process has helped a lot.

Deep learning is a subset of AI, that has the potential to modify the future of marketing by predicting consumer behavior for businesses. It is basically a machine learning method that uses neural networks, close to those found in human brains. This network is very useful when it comes to voice recognition, employee time tracking software, language translation and perceiving objects.   

A well-known example of deep learning using to predict human behavior lies in self-driving vehicles. Many renowned universities like Cornell and Standford developed “Brain4Cars” programs, which consist of cameras, wearable devices, and sensors. These devices will continuously monitor traffic. This system will alert the driver when he is on the fast track and can even predict accidents. The system can apprehend the driver’s behaviors 3.5 seconds faster. 

Unwrapping new customer & prediction

A deep learning mechanism is able to find patterns inside of patterns within huge data to help retailers find the perfect audience they want. Deep learning has opened a doorway to hyper-personalization of marketing, by taking the intent of customer experience and interaction history. A university in China found that when deep learning was fed with information like consumer’s work conditions and hobbies, the system was able to predict automobile purchase intent and also the preferences of various groups of consumers.  

  • With Ai, marketers can rely on more authentic and data-driven insights, rather than making assumptions. 
  • CEO of Black Swan Data explained working of AI, and said Marketers can take social data, like customers sentiment data gathered by social media listening tools, to identify patterns that can help them forecast consumer behaviors months in advance.”
  • The research suggested that by 2023, almost every business will be using AI-tools to target the perfect audience

The prediction of what customers want, and perceive it right is like heaven on earth for marketers.

A dramatic increase in investment of deep learning tech

Today many corporations are already using advance AI tools to convey a personalized experience to their consumers, and predict what they will be needing afterward. 

Let’s take an example of the most famous streaming app today, Netflix. And also the infamous e-commerce site Amazon is also taking from AI. 

  • Their AI-driven recommendation is 85% more accurate.
  • Netflix is able to save up to $1 billion annually with the help of machine learning algorithms.
  • Amazon is using AI algorithms to speed up their deliveries, by stocking products close to favorable buyers. To reduce delivery time. 

Speaking of deep learning apps, how can one forget Google and Facebook. Google is using this for Google cloud, where Facebook is not far behind. With its development of DeepFace helping to recognize people in pictures with near to perfect accuracy. This social media giant is now up to create a unified deep learning framework, which will be accessible to their developer’s community. 

In the world of remote employment, many tools are being developed to ease employer. Helping them to provide insight into employee engagement activities. With the help of intelligent worksheets measuring your employee’s productivity is not that difficult today. 

However, deep learning is still in its early days, but it won’t take long to grow, keeping in mind the rapid growth of technology. Machine learning has already changed marketing tricks and tactics, and not keeping pace with the change would be a drawback for any new or old marketer. 

How to Manage profits & costs with time tracking apps

Companies are delivering exceptional customer service to their clients, by actively investing in business solutions, that utilize the latest technology and time tracking apps. Businesses also enhance their productivity as well as streamline operations by implementing such solutions.

Whether you manage a big company or a startup, wasting operational costs are not acceptable. Even a minor hiccup can lead to devastating disasters if not managed right. Thus, time tracking apps are a great way to increase profits and reduce costs, altogether. 

Companies successfully reduce their costs, by following the new trend of automating daily operations. Every minute and every task is valuable for the final project delivery no matter how minor they are.  Through time tracking apps, you can easily manage invisible billable hours such as time spent on emails, phone calls, project management and communication, meetings, and fieldwork.

If you are working with freelancers or remote teams

Knowing what your remote employees are doing and how much time they are spending on each individual task can give you a better idea of how well they are utilizing your resources. Even though outsourcing employees can reduce costs but managing them can be a hassle. It’s important you organize them strategically and in a profitable way. 

No matter how many freelancers you are dealing with every day, time tracking will remember how much time they spent on your project and generates a report so that you can calculate idle time. Therefore, time tracking apps can make every billable hour important. You don’t even have to hire in-house teams when you can outsource talent. 

Through automatic time tracking, you can also know which projects are worth your time. You can easily estimate project ROI and know which projects to prioritize more. Win-win!

Increased productivity equals increased profits

Upgrade your workplace with a time tracking tool especially if the process is outdated. This can help your employees be more productive throughout the day, and understand roadblocks through real-time monitoring. You can easily tell which tasks turn into profits and track the performance to see if your team is successful when they spend time on that certain task. This will not only help you set goals but clear expectations to gain profits and identify the idle time. 

Time tracking apps reveals invisible work and inefficient workflows. But it also helps you keep a proper check and balance on priorities, and overhead costs. Justify employee inefficiency and efficiency by identifying the tasks that drain your time, consequently your budget. 

Every good time tracking app has an admin dashboard that shows trends of each individual employee, allowing you to make informed future decisions when it comes to hirings and resources.

As Artificial Intelligence is making its way into our businesses and tools, we have more opportunities to automate and streamline almost every administrative task such as expense management, accounting, meetings et al 

Evaluate what you really need

Technology is evolving at a rapid pace. Deploying too many tools so quickly is a bad strategy. Don’t go for the products, or subscriptions that you know you will never actually use. This is one of the ways through which you can cut additional costs. Run a quick audit if need be. 

Choosing just one right time tracking tool can go a long way.  Not only will this save money but also helps streamline workflow. 

Check out the Staff timer app that offers a comprehensive time tracking solution for global teams. Available for mac and windows!