Training for Boosting Employee Engagement and Optimizing Talent

Engaged employees improve the company’s bottom line. 

Employees who are engaged at work are more likely to fulfill their potential, have higher productivity, and are retained longer than employees who are not engaged. Leaders should be able to help employees remain engaged even when the work environment may be challenging for a variety of reasons.

Training can help with employee engagement by teaching leaders how to motivate team members and make them feel like part of the company’s overall success. Employee engagement is an essential part of optimizing talent, which leads to higher performance among employees.

Gallup reports that only seven percent of employees are fully optimized, however. It’s clear that companies have a long way to go in engaging employees and optimizing their talent for today’s workplace.

Connecting With Strengths and Wellbeing

New research shows that two aspects of employment most connect with engagement to optimize talent: connecting with strengths and wellbeing. A focus on these two elements of employment may increase engagement as employees feel more fulfilled and have a greater sense of wellbeing as they work.

One important way to identify individual strengths of employees is to use cognitive and behavioral assessments as an evaluation tool, either in place of or in addition to an annual employee review. Assessments can also be used during the hiring process to better match new hires with positions that use their strengths.

Leaders should be trained on how to use assessments with employees and how to capitalize on their strengths throughout their tenure of employment. Working in concert with an employee’s strengths will make work “flow” more easily and allow the employee to advance further than if they were doing something that was not in keeping with those strengths.

Work-life balance is important for employee wellbeing and engagement. 

In addition, a focus on employees’ wellbeing boosts engagement by giving employees a sense that the company cares about how they feel, both physically and mentally. Knowing that the company cares about them engenders a sense of caring more about their work and their place in the organization.

Employees will feel more responsibility about their work and will want to do their part to advance the organization when their wellbeing is cared for by the company in a genuine and programmatic way. Some of the ways to train leaders to focus on wellbeing are to make sure employees know about wellness programs and to ask questions when behaviors suggest that the employee has an issue that needs help.

Valuing Employees as People

In addition, leaders can be trained in clear messaging that shows that work-life balance is valued and that expectations are reasonable when challenges in the home life present themselves–illness, special needs of children, or needing to take care of aging parents being just a few such situations that could occur.

In very important ways, offering support for challenges outside the workplace as well as inside it benefits the workplace by boosting engagement, which impacts productivity and retention. It literally pays to care about your employees and support them through life challenges.

Narish International wants to help your company build higher-performing teams.