3 Simple Strategies to Keep Your Team Engaged and Improve Your Business Performance.

Keeping your team engaged.

As a leader you can hire people and you can fire them, you can tell them what to do but you don’t have the power to make them enjoy what they do. Quite often business leaders are content with having an unhappy team; as long as they do what they are paid to do. This can be very counterproductive for the business. So how can you keep your team engaged?

It’s impossible to have a great company without great employees, and here are some steps you can take to mould them into the people you want to have working for you. These tips are proven methods of getting your employees to be engaged in what they do, and anybody can learn to apply them.

1) Keep Your Team Engaged: Be a team, not a dictatorship

Every ship needs a strong captain, but that’s not to mention you need to spend every minute reminding your team who’s boss. Your team will need you for guidance, but they also want to feel as though you are in tune with everything that is going on. Some managers are happy to give out lists of things to do and never want to muck in themselves, this will not sit well with the team. If you give the directive and then pitch in to reach the goal, you’ll show your employees that they are all part of a team, and they sink or swim together.

2) Keep Your Team Engaged: Give them a chance to shine

Some employees are happy to push pencils every day in order to secure themselves a pension in 20 years’ time and this is fine they are after security and aren’t looking to stand out. Other employees who want to achieve more, they will never settle for a job pushing pencils all day. These employees are always looking for a way to better themselves. If you find somebody who wants to prove themselves, let them. An employee who shows the initiative and drive to better themselves is a person that will bring your business an incredible amount of value. Don’t waste this potential.

3) Keep Your Team Engaged: Don’t take them for granted – show your gratitude

Showing gratitude goes beyond “thank you”, although those two words hold a lot of power. If your team don’t feel like their hard work is recognised or rewarded this will prevent them going the extra mile for you in the future. How you show this gratitude is as important as the action itself. For example, if somebody comes up with a million-dollar idea and you give them a bottle of wine, don’t expect that employee to stick around for much longer. Rewarding achievement is the flip side to punishing failure, and a balance between both is necessary to craft the ideal team.

As intuitive as these three traits seem, you probably know from personal experience that a lot of managers don’t quite know how to implement these strategies effectively.