Do you ever get the feeling that your workers are simply showing up to collect a paycheck rather than immersing themselves in their work?
If this is the case, then you should consider conducting an employee engagement survey to see what is causing this and how you can improve.
Employee engagement is critical to keeping your workers happy, productive, and committed to your company.
Low engagement results in disinterested work and a lack of enthusiasm, while high engagement will naturally produce better results and loyal workers. Below we have four excellent philosophies you can adopt to help foster employee engagement!
Transparency and Genuineness
One of the most important philosophies for your workplace is an open-door policy.
What this means is that managers are “leaving the door open” to show complete transparency. This begins with honesty and will help your workforce have trust in their leader.
Additionally, an open-door policy will let employees see what their managers are doing. This is a great way for workers to see that their boss is putting in their best effort at all times and isn’t just delegating away all of their work.
When this happens, managers become more accessible to their workers. This will encourage workers to feel like they are on the same side as their boss, which will make it easier to engage with them.
Any interaction your leaders have must be completely genuine. There must be no deception and they need to upfront at all times. Anytime they are caught in a lie will sow distrust in your employees and will make them unlikely to engage.
Focused Communication
Another important idea to practice is direct communication. This means dedicated one-on-one time between employee and manager that feels like a conversation rather than a lecture.
Managers need to listen to their employees and hear what they are saying. When this happens, it allows them to make changes that help their workers succeed.
One way to make this happen is by actively asking for feedback. When your workforce feels like they have a voice and their opinion matters, they will gladly chime in and engage with their work.
The import caveat to this is that listening and asking for feedback do nothing if changes are not made in response. This can have the opposite effect and make workers feel like they are speaking to a brick wall.
A final way of providing effective communication is to give compliments for good work. Employees are more likely to give more effort and do their best when they feel rewarded for it, whether that is through a bonus of verbal affirmation.
Flexibility
Offering your employees flexibility is another great way to help them engage.
The typical 9-5 work schedule that many companies use just does not work well for many employees. Some people prefer different work schedules and simply perform better at different times of the day.
There’s also a possibility that your employees have obligations that they cannot fulfill as a result of needing to be at work at a specific time.
Unless there is a direct reason as to why you need employees to be in the office at a specific time, offering them the choice of working different hours or even remotely can help them work better.
If you give them this option with the understanding that it doesn’t matter what time of day work is done, just that it is finished by a specific time, this empowers employees to have control over when they work.
This will allow your workers to pick the optimal time to do their job, which in turn can produce better work and a happier workforce.
Empowerment
As a final piece of advice, you should empower your employees and place them in the best position to succeed.
This has three key components to it; selecting the right person for the job, providing adequate training, and giving them meaningful work that matters.
When someone is placed into a job that they don’t know how to do (or don’t want to), they will naturally do it poorly. Making an employee a manager when they don’t have the right personality for it will set them up for failure.
Training is incredibly important to workplace success. This is because there needs to be a clear expectation of how to perform work that employees know how to follow. A lack of training will leave workers floundering and frustrated.
Finally, employees need to feel that the work they do matters. Punching numbers into a computer is fairly mundane and doesn’t feel very impactful. Workers that can see and understand why their job matters will feel much more excited about doing it and will give their best effort.
Closing Thoughts
Employee engagement is vital to ensuring you have a productive workforce and that people enjoy their job.
A few philosophies you can enact include transparency and genuineness, focused (positive) communication, flexibility, and empowerment.
These beliefs can create an environment that makes your workers feel better about what they do and produce more as a result. Without employee engagement, it is almost impossible for your business to successfully grow.
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