The Importance of Employee Engagement

 

Employee engagement is always a tricky thing to get right, a lot of the time it is overlooked by businesses as they do not see the importance of engaging with their employees, and building a team atmosphere.  For all organisations from a small Café to a large multinational, it is vital to get the most from each and every member of staff, but how do you do this?

 

At Blumilk employee engagement is approached in a non traditional way – all businesses are familiar with once yearly embarrassing tasks that often come up through team building, such as learning a dance routine, but due to the infrequency of these activities the effects are short lived, at Blumilk this isn’t the case.

 

A weekly tradition known as ‘Team Time’ is loved and embraced by all at Blumilk. Team Time involves each team member taking turns bringing in snacks and drinks on Friday afternoon.  Everyone gets together at 4.30pm for the final 30 minutes of the day, to relax and build relationships.

 

“We felt we needed to become closer as a team, and wanted to try something different, that didn’t feel like a team building activity, as we wanted employees to enjoy taking part and embrace it.

 

“We’ve found that Team Time gets everyone involved and they want to participate.  It helps build vital, lasting relationships between team members that work together but do not really know each other. It builds a team, which is essential to working well together. Team Time has become an important part of our work week”, says Eve Whitaker, Development Director at Blumilk.

 

Employee engagement has a greater effect than simply building relationships between staff, it affects organisational performance, including; commitment, absenteeism, turnover, efficiency and customer orientation.

 

Many organisations struggle with high employee turnover and low motivation, which can become detrimental to a business. What they don’t realise is this can be reduced by engaging with your staff.

 

Eve Whitaker, Blumilk’s Development Director said, “We are really impressed by the success of ‘team time’, we all get together and everyone participates, it’s great fun! It’s not just an excuse to finish work half an hour early, the buzz of ‘team time’ lasts through the week.  We are recommending our clients to come up with the own spin on ‘team time’.”

 

With all the special events going on in the UK this year, it gives you a great opportunity to start your very own ‘team time’, at Blumilk we have had a special themed team time this week to celebrate the Queens Diamond Jubilee (Have a look at the photos!), with events planned for the Olympics, UEFA Euro and Wimbledon etc.

 

So get your team involved and celebrate…..with a hidden agenda of employee engagement.