We had the privilege of presenting at NCEO’s conference this month on “Building a Plan to Maximize Employee Owner Engagement”.
Clearly the topic resonated, because the presentation was standing room only and many of the feedback comments submitted focused on having a bigger space for the audience.
It is exciting to see how well received this topic is. With our experience helping hundreds of employee-owned companies work to educate and engage their workforce, we have firsthand seen how important it is to have a well-thought out and intentional plan for doing so.
Our average member is contributing nearly $10,000 annually per employee to their ESOP account which is a massive investment that can and should be generating a large ROI for the business, yet only 26% of employee owned companies are measuring employee engagement.
So we wanted to share some of the key takeaways from our presentation on best practices for building a plan to maximize your employee engagement:
1. Establish Regular Cadences
Establishing regular and consistent cadences is very important for your employees. While you don’t want to dilute or overload the message with constant messaging, you also don’t want your communication and education efforts to be sporadic and off the cuff.
We often recommend a communication, event, or other similar educational effort every 6 - 8 weeks.
2. Matching Communication Methods to Your Workforce
We consistently hear about challenges some businesses face in regards to being spread out or having large field teams that don’t have or regularly use company emails and other similar issues.
However, there is still a solution for every situation. Some examples we’ve seen include printing out the handout and leaving it on-site instead of sending it as an email, or providing messaging to share during in person team meetings.
So being intentional about identifying the communication methods that will work for your workforce and leaning into those is a fundamental building block for an employee engagement plan.
3. Understanding What Messaging Lands with Your Team
We often find people in the industry are surprised to learn that data from our members shows that “Pride of Ownership” resonates more with employees than wealth building.
So before building an employee engagement plan, survey or talk to your workforce and figure out what messaging will be most effective for your workforce.
We covered quite a bit more in our presentation, but these are some of the key highlights.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Certified EO could help your company build an employee engagement plan, please reach out here and we’d love to connect with you.
