How to Keep Employees Engaged Right Now

While grappling with coronavirus stress, it's easy for your employees to feel disengaged and uninspired. Motivation can be doubly hard to find when you've gone from a fast-paced, tight-knit office environment to 2 p.m. Zoom meetings in which everyone's still wearing their pajamas.

Now more than ever, employees are counting on your strong leadership. 

According to Gallup research, it's critical that you, as their manager offer them ways to remain engaged with their work, as 70% of variances in employee engagement are owed to the team's manager. If your leadership style has heavily relied on in-person interactions, your failure to adapt to remote work could lead to plummeting productivity—though that's far from the only consequence. A lack of engagement can also reduce employee retention, efficiency, and even decrease the employee's general happiness and sense of well-being.

Employee engagement is challenging when we are working from home. If you've struggled to promote engagement within your team or organization, you're not alone. To turn things around, try some of these of-the-moment practices:

Stick to messaging priorities

You can't say it all, or rather, you can't say it all effectively. It's important to focus on the messaging that matters the most to your organization in troubled times. Rod Mickels, co-founder, and CEO of engagement solutions agency InVision Communications explains, "Any copy or creative design that doesn't live in service of a message needs to go; it is noise, and it's keeping employees from latching on to the meat of your message. Don't be afraid to trim that fat. It will keep your communication concise and help you demonstrate authenticity."

For example, if your organization has a dozen guiding tenets or an elaborate set of values, it's nearly impossible to keep them all top of mind. Instead, cut the excess and focus on the most important three. It isn't easy to whittle down your list of cherished values, but remember that honing your messaging doesn't mean you won't still embrace secondary values that follow naturally from your three primary guiding lights. Rather, zeroing in on a few priorities allows your employees to focus their efforts and generate more meaningful results.

Digitize your community activities

Missing the monthly office happy hour? You can't get your employees together for drinks these days, but that doesn't mean they should have to live in complete isolation. Find ways to create digital interactions that remind your employees they're part of a team. Consider live-streaming a concert or movie on a Friday afternoon and encouraging your team members to message one another during the feature.

At PwC, one team started a group art project called Quarantine Days that features individual team members' drawings and doodles. The creative release, judgment-free communication, and positive recognition of individual contributions all combined to make the doodle exercise memorable, fun, and stress-relieving. It brought the team closer together despite physical distance.

Lean into employee insights

Spoon-feeding directions or announcements to an uninterested audience is the antithesis of engagement. The best way to avoid this unsavory scenario: Tap into the viewpoints and motivations of your audience. Using a variety of channels to implement bottom-up communication, in which employee ideas and perspectives are prioritized in business decision-making, can engage employees by giving them a sense of ownership. 

For instance, consider enlisting your executive colleagues and managers to host Reddit-style Ask Me Anything sessions through internal communication channels. Externally, use Twitter and LinkedIn to showcase good ideas your employees have contributed. "In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, bottom-up employee communication is more important than ever. Keep employees engaged and show your appreciation by encouraging them to use their voice and connecting them with the broader organization," said Jenna Eastman, head of customer success for North America for workforce communications platform Beekeeper. "This pandemic will pass, but employees will always remember how you handled it and empowered them."

Individualize your work rules

The rules that governed work at the office might not make much sense these days, just like the traditional 9-to-5 has gone out the window for many employees working from home and caring for others. Under these new circumstances, it's important to bend formerly strict rules to fit individual needs and situations. 

For instance, health-tech company Kalderos has offered its people the flexibility to use portions of their education stipends to upgrade their home offices, allowing formerly in-office employees to more comfortably and happily work at home. Flexibility should also extend beyond benefit and budget decisions. Say your company previously held a mandatory officewide meeting at 9 a.m. every Friday. Only now, parents are working from home with their kids, while also being in charge of distance-learning duties. Reach out to your team and make sure the standing time still works. If it doesn't, put together a poll that allows employees to vote on a new meeting time. If your team's size makes a unanimous decision unlikely, give employees the flexibility to miss a meeting here and there. While the absences might have a small impact on short-term productivity, your team will be appreciative—and more engaged—in the long run.

We're all living in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. Every aspect of our lives has been touched, and a return to normal is a long way off. It's important as the leader to think about employee engagement in normal times and even more critical now. Your survival might depend on it. 

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Rhett Power was recently named the 2018 Best Small Business Coach in the U.S., joined Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches, and was named the #1 Thought Leader on Entrepreneurship by Thinkers360. He is CEO of Power Coaching and Consulting in Washington, DC, and hosts Power Lunch Live, one of the most popular business talk shows on LinkedIn's live platform. Check out his fantastic line up of guests and listen to past episodes at www.powerlunch.live.

If you enjoyed this article, here are a few other ways to connect with Rhett. You can read his regular columns on Inc. Magazine, Forbes, and Thrive Global. For speaking and coaching inquiries, please email [email protected].