THE GAME CHANGER - BUILDING EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIP IN MODERN DAY BUSINESS:

Businesses around the world are struggling to increase employee engagement. According to Gallup’s 2022 State of the?American Workplace?report, only 33 percent of the nation’s workers are actively committed to their jobs. The rest are either passively or actively unengaged, meaning they either don’t care enough to put forth their best effort or are actively conspiring against their employers.

To properly address and improve employee engagement, managers need to strengthen their relationships with their team members. Here are ways managers of all levels can cultivate such a bond with their employees:

1. Strengthen Their Managerial Skills:

Many employees don’t hold their managers in the highest regard, viewing them as incompetent or even malicious. Research suggests some truth to these assumptions, as Gallup found the majority of managers aren’t actually fit for the position.

Only 10 percent of the population naturally develops the required managerial skills, while other professionals are teachable but not innately talented. However, businesses choose suitable managerial candidates in a mere 18 percent of cases.

2. Create Effective Employee Engagement Programs:

Given the statistics, most businesses recognize the need to start an employee engagement initiative. However, most of these programs are ineffective or at least not as well designed as they could be.

They typically rely on surveys to understand how team members feel, and then design activities or perks to increase employee happiness.

These approaches can be helpful, but they don’t address the most significant component of low engagement: poor leadership.

3. Provide Immediate Positive Feedback

In addition to proper leadership and compelling engagement programs, managers can further their relationships with their teams by providing positive feedback. People who receive consistent, helpful feedback that reinforces positive behaviors generally outperform those who do not.

Its best if this feedback is delivered as quickly as possible, as one study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases showed that timeliness strongly encourages high performance.

4. Offer Quality Evaluations:

Aside from immediate positive reinforcement, managers must also hold structured performance reviews on a regular basis to build stronger relationships with their employees.

Doing so provides an opportunity to delve deeply into specific assignments or issues concerning an employee.

Like engagement programs, performance reviews are widely but not effectively used. Many businesses still rely on annual evaluations only, forcing managers to review a year’s worth of goals and achievements in a single setting.?

5. Experience Their Work

Even with quality evaluations, team members often feel that their managers lack a true sense of what happens in the office day to day. This may well be true; because of their position, managers know what their teams accomplish as a unit but are removed from smaller achievements and struggles.

As such, it’s harder for them to recognize the minor but consequential issues their teams face. Problems like inefficient software and excessive bureaucracy seem like small details, but those details can build up and make it harder for teams to perform efficiently.

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