Effective communications and visibility can enhance your connection with your people, your people's connection to the business, and their connections with each other. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Employee engagement is a hot topic, and however you define it, having your employees aligned, connected and interested in the success of your company seems like a reasonable objective for business leaders. However, in a society where attention spans are narrowing and a business environment where change is rapid and constant, holding on to your teams' interest and focus is a huge challenge.

As the CEO of Reward Gateway, a high-growth global technology company, our ability to adapt to and be comfortable with change is a key driver of our success. The reality, however, is that change is uncomfortable for most people, and the worst thing a leader can do is pretend that change doesn't cause anxiety, stress and distraction to employees. Putting the right strategies, tools and methods in place can help your team remain engaged and aligned throughout challenging times of change.

Related: 4 tactics to ramp up employee engagement in 2019

Two common threads that anchor effective employee engagement strategies are communication and visibility. Effective communications and visibility can enhance your connection with your people, your people's connection to the business, and their connections with each other. Ultimately, these can help reduce the common stresses of a fast-paced, high-change environment.

Effective communication is a fundamental element of employee engagement, and this requires relevant content and accessible distribution. Giving your people the information they need and want to know, and delivering messages you want them to hear in a way that grabs their attention is essential. Ensuring that your people can hear or see these messages whenever and wherever they are located will improve your chances of connecting with and engaging your people.

Reaching employees where they are

With an increasingly remote and mobile workforce, having an effective means of communicating with your people is increasingly important, and at the same time more challenging. We have a platform that serves as a central hub for employee communications, recognition, and benefits. When employees need to connect with the business, they have one place to go, and when the business needs to connect with our people, we have a centralized place to reach them.

We also recognize that our people are highly mobile and want information on their time, so we make sure our employee engagement platform is available through a dedicated mobile app.

Like most organizations, we  use several communication tools, including email and messaging services like Slack, and our central engagement platform is integrated with a number of other services. This allows our announcements to be automatically distributed across these other communication tools to maximize their reach.

The bottom line is that to effectively communicate with your people, you need to take the message to them where they are. Having the right tools to distribute your messages will increase your chances of reaching them as they move through their busy days.

Visible communications

Another effective tool you can use to connect with your people, especially during times of change, is visibility. When I say visibility, I mean visibility of leadership with your people, and visibility of all employees with each other. Leadership must make themselves and their messages accessible to their people, and if employees are able to see the work and contributions of their colleagues, it will help create a greater sense of team and collective purpose and mission.

I have learned in my nearly 20 years holding executive positions with small and medium-size companies is that employees are actually interested in what managers and other leaders have to say about the business, and I am sure this is true of larger companies as well. This is especially true in my current role as chief executive, as my opinions help shape the strategic direction of the business.

I write a weekly internal blog that is distributed globally across our employee engagement platform. In it, I discuss highlights from the prior week, promote upcoming initiatives, and sometimes simply give my personal perspective on various topics that I believe are impacting our business, our people, or our company culture. I also make a point of personally writing announcements around significant personnel or other strategic changes made in the business. These, too, are posted on our engagement platform and distributed across our other communications channels. I believe that my visibility across all of our teams, which are located in four countries and seven offices globally, is important in creating alignment with our people.

The same is true with my leadership team, as I encourage them to communicate directly with the business with blogs and other articles through the same employee platforms. I find this activity so important that I include their visibility and blog or article contributions as part of their performance reviews.

In addition, we use company-wide communications to promote visibility of newer and developing leaders in the business by asking them to contribute articles about their own areas of the business or unique positions in our culture. Visibility helps developing leaders demonstrate their roles, responsibilities, and importance to the business.

Finally, globally visible communications are an excellent way to amplify recognition of managers and non-managers alike. Whether in the text of my weekly blog, or in articles highlighting other projects and initiatives, individual employees receive global recognition for their contributions in these internal information releases. Much like seeing your name in a local newspaper article, this type of recognition serves to relate the successes of the business to our people and promotes individual incentive, commitment, alignment, and—yes—engagement.

Explain the 'Why'

I've learned many things through my consistent and highly visible communications with my  teammates, but perhaps the most important is the value of being transparent, timely, and always explaining the “why” when discussing changes in the business. People need to understand the reasons behind decisions and change, and not just the process. Employees also need to know what it means for them, and how they can contribute to a particular initiative to support the company's overall mission and strategic objectives.

Visible peer-to-peer recognition

In addition to leadership providing manager-led recognition to individual employees, another effective means of promoting employee engagement is developing a culture of continuous recognition. There are several technologies and methodologies available to support peer-to-peer recognition programs, but a powerful element of our program is the social recognition feature.

Every day, scores of our employees send hundreds of internal messages (e-cards) to others in the business acknowledging particular contributions, and each message is connected with one of our company's values to align actions with our culture and mission. Most important, many messages are also immediately posted to our “social wall” where all of our global employees can see the notes of recognition. Other employees can then add “reactions,” such as “likes” or other supportive emoji, thus amplifying the recognition moment.

In this age of social media, we live and operate in a much more visible society, and many of our employees live their personal lives sharing and observing their day-to-day activities with friends (and others). If we are to effectively communicate with our employees today, we need to incorporate these new methods into our people and communication strategies. The Social Wall mirrors the public visibility that many of our team members are used to in their personal lives and creates a recognition experience they can more easily relate to.

The world is changing the way we communicate, but it hasn't changed the importance of an engaged workforce. By committing to leadership visibility, strategically making internal recognition more visible, and using modern tools to effectively communicate with your people, you can move the needle on employee engagement in this fast-moving and ever-changing business and social landscape.

Doug Butler is Chief Executive Officer of Reward Gateway, a global human resources SaaS company headquartered in London. Prior to joining Reward Gateway, Butler was co-founder, President and CFO of Latisys, a US based datacenter and managed hosting provider. Prior roles included being CFO at two telecommunications infrastructure businesses, and 10 years in investment banking and corporate finance at Barclays Capital, GE Capital, and Chemical Bank (now JP Morgan).

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