Raising Employee Engagement
Raising employee engagement is a subtle but crucial goal of any manager. This is a critical element of any team management and has direct impact on business performance, team morale, and individual motivation. While everyone goes through periods in their career of feeling more or less engaged, here are some ways you can ensure you maintain a higher and consistent level of engagement among your team as a leader:
1. Gauge the issue 🎯
Using surveys, individual feedback sessions and performance reviews, understand that if you have an issue of disengaged team members, where is this rooted. Is it at the project or client level? Is it a concentrated or global issue? Are certain members of the team, who fulfil a specific role, feeling more acutely disengaged than others? Knowing where the problem lies is the easiest way to identify a strategy to mitigate risks for further disengagement and helps resolve it quicker. Ensure you are gauging feedback on employee engagement on a regular basis and from all parts of your team.
2. Integrate engagement at the local level to the organisational level 👊🏽 When team members are less engaged, the matter usually occurs at an individual level and that is where the real shift in the problem also occurs. But this change only takes place once company leaders, across management levels set the tone for everyone. Since your organisation stands to gain the most benefit from highly engaged employees, aim to integrate employee engagement into performance goals that individuals are able to measure themselves against. Managers need to work closely with their team members to make them feel empowered that their engagement has a direct impact in the work place, and help members identify opportunities to affect positive change in their environment.
3. Spread the responsibility 👩🏽⚖ Talented managers know that their organisation's success is based upon each employee's success. Tackling employee engagement issues can be a complex problem that requires a variety of angles to approach from. That's why it is important that as a leader, you share the responsibility of making people feel motivated and engaged everyday at work. Great managers empower their team, value their contributions, and actively seek their input. Select your best team members and make them ambassadors of driving engagement. This can be through giving them responsibilities to organise team bonding exercises, collect opinions and surveys from team members, or have casual one-to-one chats with others. The more your team sees many people caring about their well-being, the greater the likelihood of lifting individual engagement.
4. Give Training 🎓 Building meaningful engagement is incumbent upon a company culture of trust and accountability. This means setting your team up for success through providing proper training and development initiatives. This can vary from task specific technical training to softer skills such as communication and management. This will particularly help you navigate a big team, especially if you empower those you are parsing responsibility for boosting engagement to through the right training channels.
5. Set out realistic goals 📆 Raising employee engagement means making significant effort across the team. Managers need to commit to setting engagement goals that are meaningful to their team's day-to-day tasks. Goal setting can occur at a myriad of levels in an organisations. From broader company level strategies, set out by management, to team targets and individual goals, engagement can be defined in many ways. However you choose to integrate engagement goals into your team, ensure that you hold regular meetings, check-ins and planning sessions to create follow through on that goal.
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