Top tips for how employee engagement can help your business grow
You probably already have the resources you need to grow. Not more capital or more hours — the people already sitting in your business.
The growth strategy for your business may take many shapes. Launching a new product or service. Expanding into a new market segment. Going after a customer you’ve never gone after before.
Every one of those plans arrives at the same question: do I have the resources to do more?
If your first thought is that you need more capital, more investment, or more hours in the day — think again. You probably already have most of what you need. Or rather, you already have the who.
Your employees are your best growth strategy.
Employee engagement tips that can help your business grow
1. Share the idea with your employees as early as possible
You know your business and your customers well. So do your employees — often from angles you never see, because they’re the ones on the phone, on the floor, in the inbox.
Prepare your idea as something to be pitched, and pitch it to them. Then ask them to react to it from three different seats:
- As a customer — would you buy this?
- As an investor — would you put money behind this?
- As an employee — could we actually deliver this?
Gather the honest feedback. Then close the loop, which is the bit that matters. If you’re going ahead, tell them how their input shaped the plan. If you’re not going ahead, tell them why not.
You’ve just given everyone a voice in the future of the company. That sense of purpose is the engine of employee motivation, and you didn’t spend a penny on it.
2. Let them bring their own ideas to you
The immediate consequence of sharing your ideas is that people start sharing theirs.
Let them. Let them contribute to the growth plan — spotting efficiencies you’ve stopped noticing, naming customers you hadn’t considered. Ask them to pitch it to the team properly, and work through it together: what do we take forward, what do we park, and why.
Make your employees feel like business owners. Not as a slogan on a wall — as a thing that literally happens on a Thursday afternoon when someone stands up and pitches.
3. Allow your employees to fail
Growth comes from new ideas. Most of your new ideas will come from your employees, if you let them.
Every one of those is a learning opportunity — for them, for you, for the business. So test them. Gather the insight. Then decide, promptly, whether it’s viable. Invest in the new idea, but at small scale. Don’t risk the whole business on it.
You will create an environment of growth if your employees know it is okay to fail, as long as something was learned. That’s the whole trick. Because the person whose idea didn’t work, and who wasn’t punished for it, is the person who comes back to you with the next one.
And you don’t know which one of those is the idea that sends the business soaring.
Before you go
None of this works if you’re guessing at how your team actually feels. Employee engagement surveys are a straightforward way to measure commitment, motivation and wellbeing — and to find out where to start.
