Employee engagement is not only affected by how the company as a whole treats and values its staff but by all the interactions an employee has in the work place.
Business owners or managers has the most significant impact on employee engagement, and they play a key role in sustaining it. How effective the organization executes its employee engagement strategy will highly affect how well the employee relation with the management, thus achieving high employee retention.
Practical tips supporting employee engagement
Here are some practical tips on how to support employee engagement and maximise your team’s performance:
Listen – Hear what your team has to say…..about almost everything. I mean really open up not just your ears but your heart in listening to what they say, seek their thoughts and don’t just dismiss their views, opinions and ideas.
Common mistake a business owners or bosses made when they ask for input from their team on a particular topic, they already have certain opinion on the answer or perception of the person who are feeding back.
Regardless if is feeding back on small issue such as colour of a wall or bigger problem like a customer complaint.
If you are not ready to accept any negative feedback or better suggestions (at least better than your own), don’t waste time in asking for one.
The worst case scenario is shooting down and criticising a particular feedback. If you do that, good luck the next time you really need one.
Get to know your team – “Sure, I know my team. Jane is good in creating software that customer wants, and it sell. Johnny is a great salesman……”
I am not just talking about how well you know your team professionally in achieving goals and completing their job even thought this is an important part of understanding your team. I am saying knowing who they are as a person rather than what they are good at work. Just to name some:
- What is the passion of your people? Their hobbies? Favourite food, colour?
- Family background. Know the spouses, sons and daughters? Is the spouse working? What kind of work? How many children? How old are they? What’s their name? Family financial condition?
- What is important to individual? Secure job? High Salary? Lifestyle? Responsibility? Respect?
Don’t just play lip service to this, they will know, so be genuine! Remember they are each unique, just as you are, so they might not like the same things, feel the same way or want the same things!
Act like a leader – Ensure you are available to members of your team when they need you. Actively support them in their development.
Seek opportunities and ways to help them grow and reach their goals. Talk to your team about what’s happening in the business, about work in the team and, importantly, about them as individuals.
“Walk the talk” set expectation on your people only if you can also do it yourself. No exception because you are the boss. Be firm on what is the right decision made based on company’s principle and values. Be fair to everyone in the company regardless of rank and file.
Most important of all, lead them.
Empower – Empower them to make decisions and take ownership of projects. Trust them to do the job and ask for help from you if they need to. Empowerment comes with responsibility, made sure your people understand the expectation clearly.
Provide the right tool – Ensure they have everything they need to do the job and do it to the best of their ability. Training, skills or experience must be provided to the people assigned to the job.
Ensuring them they will have the highest chance of success on the task they undertaken.
Have Fun – Might sound odd, however, having fun at work breeds excitement and energy. These are some of the key signals of engaged employees.
Imagine an excited employee talking to a customer versus a disheartened employee talking to one, which customer do you think would come back again? Celebrate success as a team even if only one of the member has the achievement.
Simply just enjoy the process as a team and have fun.
Creating good employee relation and obtain high employee retention
By no means is this the only list for effective employee engagement, these are mainly some suggestions of what business owners and managers can do to effectively engaging their people as a team.
The list can be easily expanded to all your interactions with other staff in the organisation, your suppliers and your customers too. The most important factors to be effective is doing them sincerely and genuinely.
Employee engagement is a set of positive behaviours displayed by employees which impacts in a positive manner on colleagues, suppliers, customers and the organisation, with everyone getting the results that matter to them.
In the long term, the organization will build good employee relation benefiting the business, thus resulted in high employee retention.
Recent Comments