Employee engagement is an important workplace approach that seeks to motivate employees and create the right conditions for them in the workplace. The key here is to make your employees enthusiastic so that they give their best every day. Employee engagement ensures high employee productivity and better customer experience. Engaged employees are motivated and tend to remain with the organization for a very long time. This results in better employee retention.
Not just in terms of employee retention, employee engagement also strengthens your brand image and increase your profits. The key aspect of employee engagement should be to engage your employees in the brand itself. While your marketing or sales team is constantly trying to promote your brand, maybe it will be a good idea to unite your entire workforce towards creating goodwill about your brand. Your employees are an asset to the organization, and they act as brand ambassadors.
On one hand, when your packaging and marketing appeals to the audience, it is your employees who are making connections with the customers on a personal level. Because your employees have constant interaction with your customers, it is important that they understand completely what your brand is before delivering its promise. The key here is to create a company culture where your employees are aligned with the brand’s aims and objectives. Employee engagement is also used in employee performance management in companies.
In this article, I shall discuss some of the steps that you can incorporate to incorporate employee engagement to live up to your brand promise:
Create an awareness of the brand
It is understandable that your PR team or your marketing team needs a thorough understanding of the brand because they are the ones endorsing your brand. But this does not mean that you exclude your employees in the process. Your employees deserve to know what your brand stands for because they are working backstage. Therefore, try involving them in developing brand strategies. It is always good to have a culture of continuous feedback on developing brand strategies. They can work in teams and come up with unique ideas.
Brand training programs for leaders and managers
On one hand, when your employees are working according to their area of expertise, probably it is not such a bad idea to get them trained in certain brand related courses. Apart from this, your managers and leaders need to enroll themselves in brand training programs because they can develop strategic brand objectives for their teams. Your leaders and managers need to understand the brand completely in order to disseminate it to the other employees.
Employees tend to feel comfortable around their leaders because they trust their leaders. When leaders and managers have a comprehensive understanding of the brand, they will be able to communicate the brand objectives clearly to their employees. Your leaders and managers need to buy the brand in their head before convincing their employees. Once they are completely aware of what the brand means and incorporate the brand objectives while performing their duties, employees would do the same.
Brand building activities
This is an important aspect of disseminating your brand values to others including your employees. You can conduct brand building events in important conferences and media meets. You can involve your employees in handling these events. For instance, if you are planning to conduct interactive events, let your employees manage a stall with a lot of brand exhibits. Let them dress up in costumes if necessary and interact with the customers.
Apart from this, you could also conduct fundraising events, lecture events, and workshops so that your employees can gain a lot of knowledge about the brand while it is being targeted towards customers. The advantage of conducting a fundraising event will help your employees realize that the company has more to offer rather than just profits and numbers. Moreover, you could conduct fun activities such as brand quizzes and fun-filled events to boost your employees’ knowledge.
Goal-setting aligned with brand objectives
Goal setting is an important process that guides your employees on what they do. It is important that you communicate your brand objectives to your employees before setting measurable goals for them. Your goals need to generate awareness among your employees. For instance, if your brand is a cosmetic industry, then your goal can be, “increase brand awareness of say, “XYZ” to 10% this year. This is a good structure for your employee goal. It has a brand element attached to it.
Moreover, you can encourage your employees to set brand-oriented goals along with their corporate goals. This will help them focus on their goals keeping in mind the goodwill of their brand. Once they develop a comprehensive understanding of the brand, they will be able to live up to the brand promise whenever they are fulfilling their goals. Eventually, your employees will become enthusiastic about promoting the brand in their own creative ways.
Appreciate and reward your employees
No employee likes to be taken for granted. Your employees work towards promoting your brand and it is only fair that they know how exactly they are contributing to your brand success. It is important to have continuous communication with your employees, providing them with the information related to the brand’s current status or what is it that they need to focus on. You must appreciate your employees for working hard towards living up to the brand promise.
Rewards and recognition go a long way to engage your employees. Your employee’s efforts are closely related to the success of your brand. Show them how their incentives and bonuses are closely tied to the brand value. You can also positively motivate them by giving them awards and mementos to remind them of their good work. Your employees will then be motivated to contribute more to your brand success and inspire others to give their best.
Conclusion
Your brand can become powerful only when your employees are engaged with the brand itself. Employee engagement should be accompanied by incorporating a system of continuous feedback and rewards, effective employee goal management related to the brand objectives, adherence to the vision and mission of the brand and strategic developmental plans for your employees. By doing this you can ensure that your employees are fully engaged with your brand.