Let’s face it, the back-of-house (BOH) employees of your business are foundational to your success. They play a major role in customer satisfaction, service quality and the flow of operations.
With so much dependent on the success of your BOH employees, it’s critical to provide them with adequate support. Employee engagement plays a crucial role in cultivating that support, and it’s important at all stages of an employee’s time with you.
What is employee engagement?
Employee engagement is all about how connected employees are to your business, their fellow employees and the work they do. It is based on the employee’s perception of various elements of their workplace and how it affects them.
It should be noted that employee engagement is not the same thing as job satisfaction, employee well-being or even employee happiness. Those all may become part of engagement in some form, but they are distinct and different from each other.
Why should I care about employee engagement?
Employee engagement has a direct impact on several different aspects of employee-employer relationships, both in potentially positive and negative ways.
An employee who has positive engagement with their workplace feels fulfilled and invested in their role. They ‘love their job’. They find enjoyment, fulfillment and even pleasant challenges in their work.
Positively engaged employees have a high retention rate, tend to work harder and are more efficient and willing to contribute to the overall well-being of the company.
Negatively engaged–or ‘disengaged’–employees, on the other hand, are employees who harbor negative feelings or emotions about their role or work environment. Unlike a positively engaged employee that tends to be a cheerful, harder worker, a disengaged employee is often apathetic and inefficient.
Employee engagement, positive or negative, is a factor in your business whether or not you take an active role in cultivating it. So let’s take a look at some ways you can go about fostering positive engagement with your BOH employees and make your business more effective along the way.
Employee engagement strategies you should try
Learn how your team is motivated
You’re not going to be able to engage your BOH team effectively unless you know what motivates them. You can find this out by trying different strategies and analyzing the results. Employee surveys are a highly effective way to gain insight into how your employees feel and what you can do to support them.
Of course, sharing surveys is useless if they aren’t used, so it’s important to be creative about how you deliver them.
One approach businesses are taking comes in the form of online surveys, which can be easily distributed via QR codes embedded in digital signage and displays in your BOH environment. UPshow connect allows you to easily set up QR codes and landing pages for your employees to access with their mobile devices at their convenience.
This makes it easy to identify pain points in your employees’ experiences, gaps in their knowledge and moves you one step closer to providing BOH staff with the support they need. It demonstrates you’re as invested in their success as you want them to be in their work!
Set a common goal to achieve
Your employees may assume some of your business's abstract goals–make more this month than last month, increase customer flow, etc. But ultimately, setting concrete, measurable and specific performance goals for all your BOH employees to work towards can dramatically improve employee engagement.
Possible common goals may include but are not limited to setting monthly sales goals, signing up new Rewards program customers or even creating a target sales number for limited or promotional items.
One resource you may consider to help you meet these performance goals is UPshow SHIFT, a digital signage software solution that is tailored specifically for deskless environments and BOH staff. SHIFT allows you to display key performance indicators and company-wide goals, as well as streamline training processes. When employees have clear directions and performance standards to follow, it makes it easy for them to excel at their work. This can alleviate the pressure new employees feel during onboarding and can significantly reduce employee turnover rates.
Add a little friendly competition
While striving towards a common goal can be quite motivating for many employees, some employees in your workforce may find a little healthy competition to be a tremendous motivator.
Many people are naturally competitive, and friendly competition can help engage those tendencies and draw out their best efforts. It can also foster an environment that encourages employees to take on more responsibility while rewarding ambition.
UPshow’s SHIFT is the perfect tool for this. It makes it easy to display progress and performance metrics that keep employees accountable while celebrating growth. UPshow makes it easy to track and share this information because it pulls information from your business’s point-of-sale system.
Motivating your employees with concrete goals has never been easier!
Recognize hard work when you see it
Employee recognition goes a long way! Letting BOH staff know that their efforts are appreciated and seen is an easy way to boost employee engagement.
You can easily design and display celebrations of employee success with UPshow’s Canva integration. With hundreds of free templates to choose from, you can make your screens the centerpiece of employee engagement.
UPshow makes it easy to customize displays with photos and bios of your employees, sharing POS sales metrics and highlighting their best qualities. You can even create robust recognition campaigns that allow staff members to share shoutouts that can be displayed on screen, too.
Cultivating an environment of support and recognition is a crucial part of developing strong employee engagement strategies.
Make employee learning an ongoing practice
Keeping your employees up to date on policies and procedures can be a challenge, and a lack of awareness can disconnect employees from their work and make it difficult to perform.
UPshow SHIFT makes it easy for you to ensure that your employees have the resources they need without needing to run multiple meetings a week. It’s an easy way to ensure that employees who have different learning styles are still able to retain information and stay engaged in their work.
You can incorporate live polls and trivia games to make learning exciting, too!
UPshow SHIFT is the platform for your BOH employee engagement strategies
UPshow SHIFT is the premiere digital signage software solution for engaging with your employees and keeping them invested in their work.
UPshow SHIFT includes a variety of features that make it easy to create and display employee engagement content in just minutes. Best of all, you’ll be able to track and measure results almost instantly! With real-time analytics, QR code integration and mobile-friendly landing pages, you can easily find out what your employees find most engaging. Automated scheduling makes keeping employees engaged easy, without the need for meetings that may not be effective. Ready to make your staff more engaged in their work? Try a demo of UPshow today to see what we can do for your business.
