4 Ways to Keep Your Employees Engaged?

A recent gallop study shows that only 32% of U.S. employees are engaged with their employers. It is important to pause for a moment and consider what this truly means for organizations. When employees are not engaged, employees are not delivering their best work. Imagine how bad a baseball team would be if 6 out of 9 players on the field were not engaged. The team would have so many weaknesses that it would be hard for them to compete. In an environment where the norm is for employees not to be engaged, organizations that can drive high levels of employee engagement position themselves to have a competitive advantage. Solving your employee engagement issues requires understanding why employees are not engaged. Gaining this information is best done by having one on one conversations, but some of the most common reasons are

• poor clarity of expectations

• lack of connection between the company's mission and daily activities

• limited opportunities for learning and growth

• poor job fit

• employees not feeling cared for at work

All is not lost. In the next 30 days, you can implement steps to improve employee engagement within your organization. Those steps will require you to dedicate one-on-one time with employees, but that time can reengage employees currently going through the motions at work and only delivering a portion of what they are capable of.

Provide Opportunities for Professional Development:

One of the common complaints voiced by employees is that they are interested in advancing their careers, but they are unsure how. Managers of employees should talk with employees about career goals and help map out action plans to help employees develop the skills and competency necessary to advance their careers. Employees often struggle to identify which external training, education, books, podcasts, networking, and volunteer activity they should participate in to grow professionally. Holding meetings regularly where positive and developmental feedback is given is a great way to help employees develop professionally. Managers should assist employees in setting SMART goals around the skills they need to improve to excel in their current role and prepare themselves for advancement opportunities. This, along with connecting employees with mentors, is an effective way to help employees advance their careers.

Encourage Open Communication:

Employees who joined your organization because they believed you would be a good person to work for. Over time, how you interact with them will influence if they maintain that belief. When you invest time in developing a relationship with your employees, you increase the chances of them providing you with honest feedback. With this feedback, you can take actions to address their concerns. Sometimes resolutions can be found by giving a different perspective to the employees. Other times, employees will provide you with information that will result in you making changes. Occasionally a resolution will not be found, but you will have the benefit of awareness, and employees will know that their concerns were heard. As the boss, it is up to you to decide what you do with feedback, but it is critical that your employees feel comfortable communicating with you. Often employees leave jobs over problems that could be solved with open communication. As the leader, it is your responsibility to create open lines of communication.

Provide Incentives and Recognition:

Providing incentives is an excellent way to help to clarify expectations for employees. When you take the time to develop incentives that reward employee behavior, you can motivate employees to execute organizational values and strategy at a higher level. When incentives are linked to specific performance metrics, employees can work towards achieving those metrics. When incentives are around specific behaviors, employees can learn the desired values and actions and strive to bring them to life. Small steps like changes in titles, bonuses, and wage promotions can significantly boost employee self-worth, self-esteem, and happiness within an organization. As a manager, you should seek opportunities to recognize and reward employees for their good work. Your actions will create a culture of positivity that will aid in employee engagement.

Make Fairness a Priority:

As you make decisions in your company around compensation, benefits, employee development, assignments, and promotion, ensure that you do so fairly. Often time managers make decisions quickly without taking the time to consider how their actions will be perceived or the unintended consequence they could generate. Unfair treatment can create friction within an organization that demotivates employees. Particular attention should be spent considering how policies and procedures potentially disadvantage minorities and individuals of low status. Structural discrimination exists, and decisions influenced by unconscious biases frequently demotivate and alienate employees from under-represented groups.

Summary

As a manager, you can create a supportive environment that encourages employee engagement. How you engage with employees directly impacts their motivation and commitment. Improving employee engagement takes time and intentionality. It requires you to be purposeful about organizational culture, to listen, to use good judgment, and adjust how things are done to meet the changing needs of your employees. The pandemic shifted employee expectations, and there is no going backward. This, along with the natural transition of baby boomers retiring and generation z employees entering the workforce, is causing a shift in what employees want. They expect companies to be better stewards of their time and careers. The bottom line is that employees want to work for managers that care about them and their future. This can be done if you are willing to listen to your employees and provide them with the level of support they desire.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching services for managers, executives, and small business owners.

For tips on leadership and professional development, follow me:

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

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Tips for Managing a Hybrid Workplace

Employees loved the work-from-home policies companies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. They gave employees greater flexibility in managing the competing priorities between home and work life. Employees could spend more time with their families, better manage household activities, save money on fuel, and less time in traffic.

Since so many employees loved working at home, why are so many companies shifting back to requiring employees to come into the office? Companies like General Motors claim that they require employees to return to work to boost productivity (5). These claims tell us more about the company's ability to be productive in a remote work environment than the effectiveness of work-from-home policies. Companies that can master remote and hybrid workplaces will have a competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining talent.

Hybrid workplaces give you access to a large talent pool.

Decisions like allowing remote or hybrid work can significantly impact a workforce's demographics. In executive coach David Lancefield's article Stop Wasting People's Time in Meetings, he cites that "64% of GenZ and 63% of Millennials consider their office to be their laptop, headset and wherever they can get a strong internet connection, compared to only 48% of Gen X and 32% of Baby boomers" (3). The decision to require employees to return to work will have less impact on Gen X and Baby Boomers because they put less value on remote working and have spent more of their careers working in an office.

For GenZ especially, the last two years have set their expectation on what work life should be. Many recent college graduates spent 50% of their college years taking remote classes where they developed remote working skills. Younger workers have the skills and desire to work remotely and will gravitate to organizations that give them greater flexibility.

Employees' expectations from employers are changing.

There is a growing trend of GenZ employees not seeing the same value in social relationships with co-workers as previous generations. In a recent survey by Capterra, half of workers between 18 and 25 said they found workplace friendships minimally or unimportant (1). Over the last few decades, people have been searching for work-life balance. Younger workers find that balance by creating clear boundaries between work associates and personal friendships. For this reason, they see less value in working in an office where there is more pressure to engage and interact socially with co-workers.

Adjusting your management approach.

For companies to retain their best talent, they must be willing to change with the times and create cultures that support remote workers. As a multi-unit operations leader, I learned early in my career that I did not have to be physically in front of my team to influence their performance. You can manage performance by implementing these best practices

• Define Key Performance Indicators. Identifying critical metrics for your team and tracking them daily, weekly, and monthly is an effective way to ensure employees accomplish the needed tasks. Instead of focusing on how or when work is completed, focus on and hold people accountable for deliverables.

• Make check-in calls. Periodically call your employees to ask them how they are doing. This replicates the management by walking around practice that most managers execute within an office setting. By doing unscheduled calls, you can get great feedback on what people are working on and how things are going.

• Schedule one on ones. In addition to check-in calls, it is essential to have a routine for meeting with employees and talking about business. This allows you and your employees to prepare for the discussion and bring topics forward that will drive business results for the company and professional development for the employee.

• Hold team meetings. Holding team meetings allows you to bring your employees together so that you can align on expectations, share best practices, celebrate wins, and build a culture of excellence. When holding virtual team meetings, encourage employees to have cameras on, ask questions, and require participation.

Real-world example.

When I was the Manager of Franchise Marketing and Recruiting, we implemented a hybrid work policy that allowed recruiters to work from home two days a week. The shift to hybrid working produced a 30% increase in leads forwarded to our sales team. When we processed the change, many of the recruiters gained 1 to 2 hours back in their day, which was huge because nearly every team member was a working mom who could better balance their life by spending less time commuting to work.

Weekly one-on-ones with employees allowed me to set expectations for productivity, capture best practices from recruiters, and share those best practices with their peers. In addition, we established a cadence of weekly and monthly face-to-face meetings to encourage peer-to-peer interaction and provide a sense of shared purpose. I attribute the productivity boost to the disciplines we put in place around communication and the improved morale that working from home generated with the team.

Summary

Being successful in a hybrid workspace requires leaders to develop new skills. Instead of companies reverting to unpopular work-in-office policies, they should identify new processes and technologies to enable productive work-from-home environments.

James Hunter's book "The most powerful leadership principle "(2002) shares the value of servant leadership and the business benefits of leaders putting the needs of their employees ahead of their personal needs (2). Change is never easy. As the boss, you might be tempted to bend your employees' will to cater to your needs. This may work in the short term but tends to lead to lower productivity, higher levels of turnover, and a constant need to apply pressure to maintain the status quo. An alternative approach is to change with the times, develop new routines, and position your employees to provide as much value as possible.

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Thank you for reading this blog

Dorian Cunion is an Executive Coach and Business Consultant with Your Path Coaching and Consulting. He is a former retail executive with over 20 years of experience in the retail industry. He is a Co-Active coach who focuses on helping professionals and small business owners overcome insecurities, knowledge gaps, and lack of direction. He does this by assisting clients to tap into their values, recognize their strengths, and develop actionable strategies for growth.

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Resources

1. Ellis, L. (2022, August 17). Americans Are Breaking Up With Their Work Friends. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/forget-work-friends-more-americans-are-all-business-on-the-job-11660736232

2. Hunter, J. C. (2004). The world's most powerful leadership principle: how to become a servant leader. Waterbrook Press.

3. Lancefield, D. (2022, March 14). Stop Wasting People's Time with Meetings. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/03/stop-wasting-peoples-time-with-bad-meetings

4. Shepardson, D. (2022, October 24). GM launching return to work plan for salaried workers in January. Reuters.