Why is employee engagement important for HR and internal communication professionals? How can personal growth initiatives help increase employee engagement? What types of personal growth initiatives can HR consider and implement?
We caught up with Lennart Gijsen, Former CRO at Speakap, to hear about the importance of personal growth on employee engagement.
What you do in a company is often impacted by the teams that you have. You find yourself enjoying the work that you do because of the people. That's employee engagement, and it's something I grew to love. If you're an HR or Internal Communications Specialist and want to have a conversation with your CFO, you might want to focus on the fact that employees can help you reach the growth that you're aiming for. Or perhaps, more importantly, you'd want to focus on how happy employees can contribute to the customer experience. And what I've learned from Speakap's customers is that they are prioritizing employee experiences for two reasons: to build the best company, and to bring in more customers. And as we all know, happy customers attract more customers.
That's an interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is an example of a customer I had met with. The company was struggling with encouraging employees to become brand ambassadors. So we came up with the idea of a friendly competition to engage truck drivers. We encouraged them to post photos of their trucks in front of wherever they were in the moment. And the results of this employee engagement initiative amaze me to this day. We saw the most interesting photos from these truck drivers who in most cases don't speak the language that the company actually communicates in. But these truck drivers were in front of the Eiffel Tower, or in front of a beautiful forest standing proudly next to their vehicles, proud to be employees of the brand. And the moral of the story here is to not underestimate the potential of turning employees into brand ambassadors. I think that this style of employee engagement is possible to achieve, and ambassadors are already present across your company.
So, where do you begin? For me, it starts with getting everyone in the same place. It's a challenge to do so physically and geographically, but it should be possible to do so digitally. And by digitally I mean using an employee engagement tool such as an employee communications app. From there on you can start thinking about how you'll level with employees once you've identified them and connected with them. You can think about what type of employee communication platform you need to use; it's the first step where everyone usually gets stuck. I think that an employee communications app could be the tool that could help with that.