Employee engagement is the key to a successful company. The more engaged your staff members are, the more they’re likely to go above and beyond for their employers, delivering the outcomes you want.
Unfortunately, engagement in the workplace isn’t always easy to obtain. For years, Gallup’s engagement reports have shown the majority of employees aren’t engaged at work. Now employees are shifting into new work styles; with the rise of hybrid and remote work, it may be even harder to keep your staff connected to your company.
For financial departments, ensuring professionals remain engaged and aligned for the future of work will be critical. Lack of engagement in the finance team doesn’t just lead to poor productivity; it can also prompt inaccuracies and disastrous mistakes in essential work. The question now is, how do you ensure your finance staff stays engaged, wherever they are?
Promote Constant Communication
One of the biggest threats to engagement in any team is a lack of communication. When staff members can’t connect and share ideas with their peers, innovation stagnates. In your financial landscape, it’s important to keep people talking and exploring new ways of boosting productivity.
Start by ensuring everyone in your team has a multitude of ways to reach out to other professionals. This could mean giving staff access to video conferencing tools for face-to-face interactions, messaging systems, and business email accounts.
Once everyone has the right technology, prompt them to use it as often as possible. For instance, on a weekly basis, you could ask everyone to share their top tips for reducing procrastination as part of a comprehensive workplace discussion. Thank everyone who gets involved with workplace communication for their input, and your level of interaction should begin to grow.
1. Prioritise Transparency
Employees don’t feel engaged by business leaders who keep them “out of the loop”. Now more than ever, your team members want to be the first to know about what’s going on in your company. This doesn’t mean you need to get everyone together for regular weekly news meetings, but sending updates through email and ensuring the lines of communication stay open is crucial.
Part of being openly transparent is ensuring everyone in your workforce has access to the same information. This could mean that if you have remote employees in your staff, you actively try to host business meeting announcements through video conferencing tools so that everyone can attend.
If anyone has additional questions about any changes in your company, make time to discuss these issues one-on-one. This can help demonstrate empathy – something many employees are looking for more of.
2. Give Teams Flexibility
Today’s finance teams are looking for more flexibility in how, when, and where they work. The last couple of years has taught today’s professionals they can work just as productively from any environment. If you can offer your finance team more opportunities to work from different locations, they’re more likely to be engaged and invested in their roles.
With the option to work both in the office and outside of it, your financial professionals will be able to choose the environment most beneficial to their productivity levels. This could mean working in the office when they need to bounce ideas off their peers and working away from the office when they need focus time and silence.
Giving your team extra flexibility to choose where they’re going to work will not only help to retain your existing employees – it ensures you can attract future talent too.
3. Recognise and Reward Your Team
No matter where your employees are working or what their new schedule looks like, they’ll still be looking for confirmation they’re doing well in their role. Recognition is one of the most important parts of keeping your team happy and ensuring they stay on the right path.
Even if you have a hybrid team full of people working both inside the office and remotely, make sure everyone gets the same level of feedback and commendation. This could mean you set up a karma or “points” system online where people can track how many “thumbs up” they’ve gotten from business leaders over the last few weeks.
You could even take extra steps to engage your team by gamifying the way people work. For instance, have your finance team compete for the highest customer satisfaction score or productivity score each week and reward those who win.
4. Keep Learning and Adapting
As the workplace continues to change and finance teams adapt to new trends in the industry, it’s important to work as a group to create the best possible workplace. Ask your employees for regular feedback on the kind of support they’re getting from supervisors and managers and what kind of extra help they might need to be more productive.
Creating an open feedback loop so your staff can help you make meaningful changes to the workplace going forward ensures you’ll continue to make the investments that best serve your team.
What’s more, building a reputation as a company that listens to its employees will help to improve your employer brand, giving you more scope to attract talented professionals in the long term.
What’s Next?
If you’re struggling to maintain an engaged team in the new world of work, partnering with the right recruitment agency can help. Your recruitment professionals will help you to hire the kind of professionals who can perform well in a range of work environments, which is the first step to ensuring continued engagement. Contact Rebus Recruitment today to find out how we can help get you back on track. You can reach us through email, or on 01282 930 930
Thanks
Rachel Mitson
About Rebus Financial Recruitment
Rebus Financial Recruitment provides a specialist and focused recruitment service to its customers, which historically range from various organisations, including SMEs, to large PLCs.
We strive to offer both the client and candidate a seamless recruitment experience. Using our expertise, we get to the heart of employer and employee needs, and, in doing so, we match the two perfectly. To find out more, get in contact with one of our team today, or you can call us on 01282 930930.
