Recently, Gallup reported that employee engagement is on the rise in the US. Despite the positive outlook, its data revealed that 53% of employees still feel unengaged at the workplace with, and a further 13% are actively disengaged.

It is important that you take steps to increase employee engagement at your business. If you do it will translate into performance improvements across the board, and could impact your profitability.

To start improving employee engagement, there are five steps that you should take:

1. Check in with employees and find out what they need

If you want your employees to be more engaged, a good first step is to engage them by talking to them and asking them what they need. Make sure they know that your goal is to help them be more engaged at the workplace, and not to penalize them for not being engaged.

2. Come up with an action plan

Based on the information you have, you should try to come up with an action plan that lists the changes or steps that can be taken to improve employee engagement. The action plan should prioritize common threads among your employees, and you should consider how it will impact your employee’s engagement levels.

3. Inform employees and keep them in the loop

Try to build on the initial step of engaging employees by informing them of your action plan and keeping them in the loop with updates on its progress. That will let them know their feedback is being taken seriously and acted on, and could even make some employees feel more involved in itself.

4. Track progress as accurately as possible

The key to a good action plan is that it should be specific and measurable – which is difficult when it comes to employee engagement due to how vague it is. However you could use free employee monitoring software such as WorkExaminer to track various metrics that will let you gauge it better.

In WorkExaminer you can specifically monitor how employees are spending their time and what they are doing on their computers. That in turn can help you to pinpoint whether the changes you’ve made are having an impact or not.

5. Recognize and reward employees

To provide more of an incentive for employees to engage, you should recognize improvements to their work and reward it. In that area WorkExaminer can play an invaluable role as well, by giving you the data you need to compare employee performance levels and efficiency.

As you can see being able to monitor employees using WorkExaminer can provide you with data that you can use to increase engagement. However you need to inform employees about how it will be used.

Some of the tools in WorkExaminer could help to improve employee engagement more directly – chiefly by eliminating common distractions using filters. In short it could play a significant part in your action plan, and will help improve most of the steps outlined above to be more effective.