Employee Engagement is becoming ever more important in the workplace and most agree that an engaged workforce is far more likely to be a successful workforce. The happier and more professional your employees are, the better the results they will deliver for you. Creating a diverse and inclusive organizational culture is the first step to increasing employee engagement and improving productivity.

Engagement is a measurement of a person’s feeling of inclusion in an organization and high levels of inclusion improves the quality of overall human capital output. Further, engagement even goes beyond human capital factors to include business subjects including reduced accidents on factory floors and the quality of innovation.

There is therefore a challenge for all employers and managers to deliver the right balance between a confident, engaged workforce, and a workforce that is driven to attain goals and be more productive. Regardless of how it is characterized, it is important to create the right balance in order to ensure that you have an engaged workforce.

Research has shown that companies who disregard inclusion as a component of their business strategy have a higher percentage of disengaged workers. Organizations that effectively capitalize on the strengths of all employees and leverage their diversity and unique values have the most engaged employees. In addition, employees with the highest level of engagement perform 20 percent better and are 87 percent less likely to leave the organization, according to a survey by TowersPerrin. A study by the Hay Group also found engaged employees were as much as 43% more productive.

If you want to increase your impact as a leader and increase employee engagement, routinely focus on these three tasks:

  1. Leverage the strengths of every individual on your team
    Get to know your team members strengths and have conversations with them about their strengths and goals. Utilize informal discussions outside of formal performance reviews.
  2. Continually affirm their gifts and help them understand how they fit in the organization
    Communicate the importance of individual employee’s roles on the team and provide public praise for positive contributions no matter how small. Make sure they know and understand their customer’s needs.
  3. Create opportunities for learning and growth
    Create a culture of learning and growth by recognizing new skills and abilities and developing formal and informal knowledge and information sharing processes. Measure the effectiveness of your learning and growth initiatives.

Improving employee engagement should be a strategic imperative if your organization wants to improve productivity, increase retention, and leverage the capabilities of all employees. Do you know if your diversity & inclusion efforts are enhancing engagement and productivity?