By Theresa Bontempo
Let’s face it, the back-of-house (BOH) employees of your business are foundational to your success. They play a major role in customer satisfaction, service quality and the flow of operations.
With so much dependence on the success of your BOH employees, it’s critical to provide them with adequate support. Employee engagement plays a crucial role in cultivating that support, and it’s important at all stages of an employee’s time with you. After all, they’re a large part of the success of your business, so you should definitely make the effort to ensure they feel recognized and engaged.
In this article we’ll discuss that and more including:
- What employee engagement is
- Tips to keep your BOH employees involved
- Strategies you can try to day to boost employee engagement
What is employee engagement?
Get to know why this is such an important part of a successful business
Your back of house employees should get the recognition they deserve when they put in the time and the hard work.
Employee engagement is all about how connected employees are to your business, their fellow employees and the work they do. It is based on the employee’s perception of various elements of their workplace and how it affects them. It should be noted that employee engagement is not the same thing as job satisfaction, employee well-being, or even employee happiness. Those all may become part of engagement in some form, but they are distinct and different from each other.
- Job satisfaction. This refers to the emotional response of employees to performing their daily work, and how they feel about actually being present at the job site.
- Employee well-being. The employee’s state of well-being isn’t just defined by their job satisfaction, but also their workload, stress levels, and their work/life balance.
- Employee happiness. Happier employees are more productive, as they take pride in their work because they feel their work is recognized and they are rewarded in positive ways. Having a positive attitude about their role in the job can significantly increase their happiness.
Why should I care about employee engagement?
Employee engagement has a direct impact on several different aspects of employee-employer relationships, both in potentially positive and negative ways. An employee who has positive engagement with their workplace feels fulfilled and invested in their role. They ‘love their job.’ They find enjoyment, fulfillment and even pleasant challenges in their work.
Positively engaged employees have a high retention rate, tend to work harder and are more efficient and willing to contribute to the overall well-being of the company. Negatively engaged–or ‘disengaged’–employees, on the other hand, are employees who harbor negative feelings or emotions about their role or work environment. Unlike a positively engaged employee that tends to be a cheerful, harder worker, a disengaged employee is often apathetic and inefficient.
Employee engagement, positive or negative, is a factor in your business whether or not you take an active role in cultivating it. So let’s take a look at some ways you can go about fostering positive engagement with your BOH employees and make your business more effective along the way.
Employee engagement strategies you should try
Try out some of these tips and see how it positively increases engagement
Spending time on employee engagement is a great way to improve employee satisfaction.
Learn how your team is motivated
You’re not going to be able to engage your BOH team effectively unless you know what motivates them. You can find this out by trying different strategies and analyzing the results. Employee surveys are a highly effective way to gain insight into how your employees feel and what you can do to support them.
Some of the top ways to find out what motivates BOH employees include:
- Online surveys
- Understand demotivating factors
- Track incentive programs
- Suggestion box
Of course, sharing surveys is useless if they aren’t used, so it’s important to be creative about how you deliver them.
One approach businesses are taking comes in the form of online surveys, which can be easily distributed via QR codes embedded in digital signage and displays in your BOH environment. Shift allows you to easily set up QR codes and landing pages for your employees to access with their mobile devices at their convenience.
This makes it easy to identify pain points in your employees’ experiences, gaps in their knowledge and moves you one step closer to providing BOH staff with the support they need. It demonstrates you’re as invested in their success as you want them to be in their work!
Set a common goal to achieve
Your employees may assume some of your business's abstract goals–make more this month than last month, increase customer flow, etc. But ultimately, setting concrete, measurable and specific performance goals for all your BOH employees to work towards can dramatically improve employee engagement. Making the goals clear for the next week, month, or quarter is a great way to ensure that they understand the long term goals, as well as the short term goals they can make a positive impact on daily.
Possible common goals may include but are not limited to setting monthly sales goals, signing up new Rewards program customers or even creating a target sales number for limited or promotional items.
One resource you may consider to help you meet these performance goals is Shift, a digital signage software solution that is tailored specifically for deskless environments and BOH staff.
Shift allows you to display key performance indicators and company-wide goals, as well as streamline training processes. When employees have clear directions and performance standards to follow, it makes it easy for them to excel at their work. This can alleviate the pressure new employees feel during onboarding and can significantly reduce employee turnover rates.
Friendly competition and recognition of hard work are stellar ways to increase employee engagement for the back of the house. Image courtesy of Cool Jobs.
Add a little friendly competition
While striving towards a common goal can be quite motivating for many employees, some employees in your workforce may find a little healthy competition to be a tremendous motivator.
Lots of people are naturally competitive, and friendly competition can help engage those tendencies and draw out their best efforts. It can also foster an environment that encourages employees to take on more responsibility while rewarding ambition.
Shift is the perfect tool for this. It makes it easy to display progress and performance metrics that keep employees accountable while celebrating growth. Shift can easily track and share this information because it pulls information from your business’s point-of-sale system. Seeing who met the goals for the week (or month) is a great motivating factor to continue to strive for better. It also gives them the recognition they deserve, and gives their co-workers something to aim for as well.
Motivating your employees with concrete goals has never been easier!
Recognize hard work when you see it
Employee recognition goes a long way! Letting BOH staff know that their efforts are appreciated and seen is an easy way to boost employee engagement.
You can easily design and display celebrations of employee success with Shift’s Canva integration. With hundreds of free templates to choose from, you can make your screens the centerpiece of employee engagement.
Shift makes it easy to customize displays with photos and bios of your employees, sharing POS sales metrics and highlighting their best qualities. You can even create robust recognition campaigns that allow staff members to share shoutouts that can be displayed on screen, too.
Cultivating an environment of support and recognition is a crucial part of developing strong employee engagement strategies. When hard work and good results are called out, it contributes to a more positive environment overall. Back of the house employees see that management really is making the effort to stay engaged, and will want to continue to put their best work forward. A happier environment also can foster a safe place where employees feel like they can bring questions, suggestions, or concerns to the management without fear of reprisals or rejections.
Make employee learning an ongoing practice
Keeping your employees up to date on policies and procedures can be a challenge, and a lack of awareness can disconnect employees from their work and make it difficult to perform.
Shift makes it easy for you to ensure that your employees have the resources they need without having to run multiple meetings a week. It’s an easy way to ensure that employees who have different learning styles are still able to retain information and stay engaged in their work. No one wants to feel like they’ve plateaued and there’s nothing new to learn. This can lead to boredom and disengagement. Offer growth opportunities, or ways to learn new skills or tasks to add to their tool belt. When employees are given the chance to keep learning, they’ll be more satisfied with their job and come to work with a positive attitude.
You can incorporate live polls and trivia games to make learning exciting, too! Shift is the platform for your BOH employee engagement strategies as well as the premiere digital signage software solution for engaging with your employees and keeping them invested in their work.
Shift includes a variety of features that make it easy to create and display employee engagement content in just minutes, and they are integrated in commonly used BOH and POS platforms such as Xenial, BrinkPOS and Aloha. Best of all, you’ll be able to track and measure results almost instantly! With real-time analytics, QR code integration and mobile-friendly landing pages, you can easily find out what your employees find most engaging. Automated scheduling makes keeping employees engaged easy, without the need for meetings that may not be effective. Ready to make your staff more engaged in their work? Try a demo of Shift today to see what we can do for your business.
