Employee engagement and employee retention are both key aspects of successful businesses, but too often when people talk about them they use the terms interchangeably.
While employee engagement and retention are closely related to one another–and in fact, both can positively and negatively affect the other–they are two distinct facets of how your employees interact with you and your business. Successful businesses learn how to use and cultivate both of these traits to enhance workplace culture and ultimately increase profits.
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement is, at its core, the culmination of how an employee feels about their place of work. Aspects of this can include how an employee feels about their role, their interactions with other employees in the workplace and how they feel about their employer. the organization by which they are employed.
Several factors can affect how an employee is engaged in their workplace, both in positive and negative ways. These factors can include but are not limited to: how much autonomy an employee enjoys, the pay structure for their position, opportunities for advancement and the company culture itself. As a result, strategies for employee engagement tend to focus heavily on leveraging these factors.
Employees can be both positively and negatively engaged with your business. Positively engaged employees tend to feel more connected to the business which may result in increased job satisfaction, heightened work ethic and overall positive feelings towards their supervisors and the organization as a whole.
Negatively engaged or disengaged employees, on the other hand, may feel apathetic toward their work. They tend to be less satisfied with what they do and feel disconnected from the business as a whole.
You may even find that disengaged employees actively speak or work against the best interests of the company, depending on how deep negative feelings run. This is why employee engagement and development is considered to be crucial to a business’s future.
What is employee retention?
Employee retention is essentially a strategy used by businesses to reduce employee turnover. Employee turnover refers to how often employees quit and have to be replaced.
Because employee retention is a blanket term, the factors that make it up are many and varied. It includes anything as simple as the wage you pay an employee to something as complicated as multi-stage employee retention plans with seniority benefits and advancement opportunities.
From an employee standpoint, what really affects retention rates is how much satisfaction they find in their job, the compensation they receive and the connection they feel to the company and management. The more satisfied and engaged an employee is, the more likely they are to stay.
Effectively, if you want to know how to increase retention in your workforce, you’ll need to learn how to increase engagement.
The effects of low retention are many and varied, and all of them are costly to one degree or another. In fact, the average cost of onboarding a new employee is $4,000. Retaining employees helps minimize onboarding and recruiting expenses, which can pile up if your retention rate is low enough.
The benefits of high retention are just as many and varied and occupy the exact opposite end of that spectrum. Employees who have been around for longer are generally more efficient in performing their duties thanks to their experience in the company. They also tend to be more loyal to their employers, and also often will offer better customer service due to longevity and familiarity with regular customers.
How do employee engagement and retention align?
Employee engagement and employee retention are almost inextricably linked to one another. A high degree of engagement among employees tends to result in greater retention rates, and a higher rate of retention will often dovetail into employees feeling more engaged and loyal to their company.
What does this look like in practice? Here’s an example! Suppose an employee has a high degree of engagement with their work. This means that they are connected in positive ways to their place of work, the people around them and the job they perform. These feelings result in increased loyalty and job satisfaction, maybe even a love for their work that goes beyond simple pay scales or benefits.
In this situation, it is much more likely that an employee will remain employed in your company even if they receive other ‘better’ offers from competing companies.
A higher employee engagement tends to result in higher employee retention. And vice-versa. A disengaged employee is much more likely to seek employment opportunities elsewhere, often making up for a lack of engagement in their workplace with salary and benefit advancements.
UPshow SHIFT: Your solution for executing employee engagement and retention strategies
Increase employee engagement and retention by boosting productivity
High engagement often comes from specific strategies designed to boost employee productivity. Friendly competition can be used to motivate some employees, while others may respond to concrete company-wide goals like working towards monthly sales targets.
UPshow SHIFT makes running employee retention and engagement campaigns easy. Businesses leverage the power of digital displays to display real-time data that is generated from point-of-sale systems to motivate employees and keep them accountable to goals. Spurring friendly competition is also easy, as you can share leaderboards and rankings that motivate teams to compete and perform.
Faster training as a strategy for employee engagement and retention
Employee engagement and retention also get influenced by how quickly employees come to terms with their tasks and responsibilities. The longer your employees spend learning, the more frustrated they may get about not contributing to the company.
Further, cutting down the time of onboarding and training allows you to see a return on your investment sooner than later. Working your employees up to established performance standards is made easy with UPshow SHIFT.
You can easily elevate training processes with digital displays that make it possible to share training videos, create training quizzes and games and display task completion statuses. UPshow has been shown to decrease training time by up to 30% using these methods.
Managing employee engagement and retention through internal communication
A critical component of both engagement and retention is ensuring you can provide strong internal communication to your employees. Employee engagement initiatives conveyed through clear, quality communication allows employees to understand exactly what is expected of them Efficient internal communication systems also clearly specify which company policies need to be reinforced.
UPshow SHIFT allows you to stream consistent messages across multiple locations and scheduling makes it easy to ensure that employees on all schedules can access important communication, even if they aren’t in-house for meetings.
Easy communication that is displayed throughout your business makes it easy to share celebratory messages, too! Welcome employees, recognize hard workers and celebrate milestones with beautifully designed UPshow displays.
Using feedback to develop strategies for employee engagement and retention
All the grand plans and motivational tools in the world will do you no good unless you know how they are being received by your employees. To this end, gathering feedback from those employees to help you shape your approaches is a vital part of engagement and retention.
UPshow SHIFT can help streamline the feedback process by directing employees to landing pages via QR codes. It makes it painless to create and share employee satisfaction surveys so you can address pain points. It shows your employees that you are invested in creating an environment they want to be in, which can go a long way in retaining employees!
Not sure which displays employees are engaging with or making use of? UPshow comes complete with a robust Insights and Analytics dashboard that makes it easy for you to figure out what's working and what isn’t.
Want to know how to increase retention and engagement in your workforce? Try UPshow
Time and time again, UPshow is proven to be the digital signage software solution that industry leaders trust, and it’s no question as to why!
Managing employee engagement and retention efforts is easier with UPshow, helping managers see a return on investment from their screens and their employees. Ready to see how UPshow can help you create a strong working environment in your business? Try a free demo today!
