Improving Employee Engagement in the Workplace.

Introduction

The ONLY engagement being referred to here is Employee engagement, as this has become a more topical issue in modern Management literature. Research has shown a direct correlation between Employee engagement and business performance. Employee engagement is about positive attitudes and behaviours leading to improved business outcomes, in a way that they trigger and reinforce one another. Employee engagement is about the employees feeling pride and loyalty working for their organization, being a great advocate of the organization to our clients, users, and customers, going the extra mile to finish a piece of work. Employee engagement is about drawing on employees’ knowledge and ideas to improve our products and services and be innovative about work.

Employee engagement is about organization actions that are consistent with the organization’s values. It is about kept promises or an explanation of why they cannot be kept.

How Managers can engage their employees

Millennials are like other employees, just that they are fascinated and affected by something different from other generations. That is the singular reason all millennials are not moved by exactly the same things. Employees are living beings; hence, they respond to stimuli. Their responses will not be the same, but there is normally some sort of response. To increase employee engagement, we need to attempt to reach out to the most responsive parts of employees. I will share various options to achieve this. Not all employees’ engagement will increase with some of the suggestions below, however, it is recommended we seek whichever ones work on different employees at whatever phase of life they are in. What this means is that the Engagement driver for employees changes per time.

1. Appeal to the Head, Heart, and Hands

Line Manager’s role in employee engagement is to capture the discretionary effort of employees by doing all they can to prepare employees to be successful. An analogy that can be used to capture this is the “head-heart-hands”.

Team members that are fully engaged usually exhibit being captured at the 2 or the 3 listed below levels

? HEAD — “I am mentally engaged in the work”

? HEART — “I am emotionally engaged in the work”

? HANDS — “I am engaged in doing the work”

2. Acknowledge Daily Progress and Remove Barriers

The greatest motivator on the job is the ability to make daily progress on important work, which is called “The Progress Principle”. It is also called the “The Power of Small Wins”, which implies that the employees see their improvement and development in bits. This provides additional impetus for further learning and development. It is a rare occurrence to find that employees who are developing have low engagement.

As important as the daily progress is, it is also important that managers play a role in the provision of resources and environment for the progress registered by the employees. The manager can help by removing barriers to progress when possible as well as by providing goals, resources, and support to team members to catalyze their progress.

3. Set Clear Expectations

Performance management activities have a direct impact on the engagement of employees, especially when they find that they are unfair or unrealistic. In many organizations, performance expectations are largely top down, however, the onus is on the line manager to explain and discuss the expectation with their team members. Whilst the team members may not be able to change the goals, their involvement provides some level of ownership which is important for engagement.

Here are some questions that can be used to think through the process of setting employee performance expectations:

? Are the goals relevant to the business?

? Is the scope of the goals appropriate?

? Are there too few or too many goals?

? Are the goals results-based and SMART?

4. Make Connections to the Organization

By explaining the connection between employees’ individual jobs and the organization, employee satisfaction can be greatly increased with their day-to-day work. A Study by Harvard Business School shows that after an analysis of over 300 different ways to motivate employees, employee’s ability to connect their job’s contribution to the organization is the best way to increase the effort they put into their work. To connect employees’ work to the organization, Line Manager should have ongoing conversations with employees throughout the year. Three critical pieces of information to communicate to employees during these conversations include:

? “Who We Are” — The organization’s goals and strategy, and what they hope to achieve.

? “Why We Exist” — The organization’s mission and vision and why the organization’s strategy and goals matter.

? “How You Help Us Succeed” — How the employee’s role helps achieve the organization’s mission.

5. Give Feedback and Ask for Feedback

A key part of a manager’s role is to provide regular feedback to their employees. There are many opportunities to provide feedback to the employees without taking significant amounts of time away from other activities. It is also important for Line Managers to ask for feedback as well. One helpful formula for providing feedback is the Behavior plus Impact model (plus Alternative Positive Behavior in cases of constructive criticism); stating the behavior, its impact, and possible alternatives help to ensure that the feedback is grounded in observation and contains specific suggestions for improvement. The more Line Managers practice using this formula, the more it will feel natural when giving feedback.

6. Be a Coach

Most employees want to make a difference in the workplace and to have a voice, a say in how the work is done. As a manager, acting as a coach to the employees to bring out their best helps them develop their skills. The GROW Model is a simple framework for structuring coaching conversations. Line Managers can help employees to establish a goal, examine the current reality, explore options, and decide what they will do. Joseph Weintraub defines this as “an ongoing dialogue with the goal of increasing learning and improving one’s ability to perform effectively now and in the future”. This approach uses open-ended questioning combined with listening to lead employees to think about situations differently and to be open to new ways of acting all with the intent of bringing out their best.

7. Recognize Strengths

Acknowledging performance strengths in formal reviews has one of the greatest impacts on employee performance. Managers can improve employee performance by up to 36% this way (HBS) because they are formally reinforcing performance-enhancing behavior. It is also critical to include the right type of constructive feedback in formal performance reviews. So, while emphasizing employee strengths, complement this with constructive feedback that employees can respond to and act on through targeted, specific guidance.

8. Reward Performance

Non-cash rewards, (e.g., a public acknowledgment or a low-cost perk) can motivate employees as much as cash bonuses in some cases. For non-cash awards to effectively increase employee effort, follow these three steps:

? Thank the Employee — Express gratitude.

? Ensure the employee understands why they are being recognized so that they and others are more likely to repeat the behavior in the future.

? Explain How the Employee’s Action Added Value

9. Provide Development Opportunities

Showing employees that the Line Manager is fully committed to helping them advance their careers requires a dedicated effort. This is best done by helping employees create development plans that are achievable and build their skills for future positions. Achievable plans focus on on-the-job development activities. Below are six different types of on-the-job development opportunities that can be discussed:

? Access to Best Practice

? Scope Expansion

? Change and Adversity

? Challenging Relationships

? Persuading and Teaching

? Making Difficult Decisions

10. Be Inclusive and Communicative about Change

It is much easier to keep people moving through transition and to manage change if leaders can describe clearly the journey people are on. Employees want to be aware of the bigger purpose and picture and included on the larger plan, so clear communication of the “four Ps” is crucial to employee engagement:

? Purpose — Why are we doing this?

? Picture — What is the outcome going to be like?

? Plan — People need to know the path to getting to the destination

? Part — Meaningful role to play.

11. Be Open to Ideas and Encourage Innovation

Employees feel like they have the most impact on the organization when the Line Managers create a work environment that encourages innovation and openness to new ideas. In this work environment, new ideas are not only suggested, but the best ones are actively managed and implemented.

12. Be a Good Leader

Line Managers are very important to the team they manage. It is important that Line Managers develop their leadership skills as this has a direct relationship with employee engagement. Good leadership attributes have a direct impact on the employees because this affects their business results as well as the development of the team members. Organizations must be willing to put resources in the development of their Line Managers because a bad Line Manager has the tendency to negatively affect his team and other teams.

In Conclusion

Employee engagement cannot be achieved by a mechanistic approach which tries to extract discretionary effort by manipulating employees’ commitment and emotions. Employees see through such attempts very quickly and can become cynical and disillusioned. All effort by Management must be wholehearted, and the employees are involved in every step of the way.