Increasing Productivity and Performance: Through Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is the degree to which team members feel personally connected to their workplace and the outcomes they are responsible for achieving. An engaged team member feels a stronger connection to their organization which in turn influences them to help the company succeed. They are fully involved in and enthusiastic about their work and thus drive the organization's goals and results.

One of the greatest barriers for employee engagement is language and this can cause lapses in employee engagement and productivity when co-workers cannot communicate or when a worker cannot tell their manager about a particular problem. Here are a few issues that management faces with non-English speaking team members, as well as solutions to the problem:

Using idioms - One major barrier to business productivity that involves language is the use of idioms. In everyday speech it is typical for an individual to substitute particular phrases or words that mean something other than their literal meaning. Businesses are notorious, furthermore, for using sports metaphors like “home run effort” or “slam dunk success” in order to describe their operations, strategies, and day-to-day operations. Idioms are some of the most difficult parts of speech for a non-native speaker to comprehend. Any business needs to ensure that their company’s printed materials, like training manuals and circulations, are idiom-free so that a literal translation makes sense.

Business language - A second area of concern for any company is the use of a business language that may be different or contrary to the vocabulary of everyday life.  Companies use terms like “paradigm” and “benchmark” and “empowerment” in order to dress up a mundane task to sound complex. When discussing company operations, minimize jargon and create a language level that could be understood by any high-school student in the country. Some businesses, especially law-related companies, rely on abbreviations in order to minimize the amount of ink they put on paper each day. Some abbreviations can cross over Spanish language barriers, like “etc.”, but for someone who speaks a non-European language like Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi, it is simply a clump of meaningless letters.

Recruit bilingual managers and supervisors - to serve as the communication link between cultures and/or engage co-workers to serve as translators while people are learning English.

Never assume your communications with someone with limited English-speaking abilities has been understood - Ask for feedback or for demonstration, particularly when you are training them

Be patient - A thoughtful supervisor or co-worker can make all the difference in helping prevent feelings of inadequacy and embarrassment when a person cannot express him or herself clearly or fully.

Cultural and language differences can hinder effective employee engagement and communication. Workers who are not fluent in the primary language used in the workplace may have difficulty expressing their needs or responding to requests from managers and colleagues. Managers may face the obstacle of having to adapt their management style to meet the needs of workers from a different culture. Workers from Latin American countries, for instance, often believe that asking questions of a supervisor is a sign of disrespect and that they should simply do as they are told. A supervisor who implements an open-door policy may become frustrated with the lack of input from these workers and have to take steps to convince them that their suggestions are encouraged and valued.

Employees are your biggest investment and should bring the greatest reward. Yet even today, in too many organizations, employees are viewed as an asset to be managed rather than as individuals who can create the next innovation for success. Long-term engagement starts with good communication between employer and employees as well as among co-workers, fostering a positive working environment.

By working with employees to create a clear career path and set goals with a potential for growth, a manager can create positive esteem within each team member. By showing them that they are valued and have responsibility, and then to recognize and reward them for a job well done, a manager can create an “involved employee.” It is then much easier to turn that sense of involvement into enthusiasm and a sense of pride in ownership that creates the highest levels of engagement with employees.

Today, employee engagement and loyalty are more vital than ever before to an organization’s success and competitive advantage. Gone are the days when a young person starting out in his or her career joined a company and stayed until retirement, in today’s business environment there are no guarantees.

Employee engagement has become a top business priority for management. In this rapid cycle economy, business leaders know that having a high-performing workforce is essential for growth and survival. They recognize that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent markets.

One of the keys to engagement is defining and articulating what constitutes a “successful” employee, these can be done by fostering high levels of employee engagement by doing the following three things:

1. Put employees in positions where they have the ability to exercise judgment in doing their jobs and learn over time through feedback;
2. Link employee performance back to the broader goals of the organization to make customer goals better; and
3. Culturally, their missions are heavily staked in offering employees autonomy, mastery, purpose, and a strong sense of affiliation. Structurally, this means top managers need to open up the decision-making authority, allowing power and responsibility to be decentralized from headquarters out into individual teams.

To engage employees as well as you possibly can, the process needs to start during the hiring process. You have to make it worthwhile for hourly employees to want to make the same decisions as a manager. It is important from that point that the potential employee is aware that we care about his or her success, and we also want to make sure they understand our core values and unique culture. If done at this stage, then the prospective employee should get the job:  they know from day one the service, honesty and passion we expect from them, as well as the fun, creative and learning environment they can expect from us.

When I talk about performance, I’m really referring to the level of service they provide to our customers, and they need to know from the start that we are not an average company, the service we provide is not average, and we do not expect our employees to be average. We expect the best, and from experience, we now know that getting this first bit right is the most important bit. Don’t spend time managing and changing behaviors.  Get them to know what’s expected from the beginning.

Each of us needs to look introspectively at our leadership and managerial capabilities. Here are a few questions each manager needs to answer: 

• What motivates staff members to excel beyond normal expected performance? 
• Have you delegated and empowered your staff to achieve success? 
• Are your team members the most capable and talented people you can afford to hire?
• Are any of the staff too weak to enable you to achieve the success you were hired to achieve?
• How effectively and objectively do you evaluate the performance and development of your team members?    

As businesses evolve, a number of inefficiencies get embedded in the processes and systems of the company. Make a deliberate effort to constantly review the processes involved in your operations and carry out optimization. Focus on efficiency and eliminate delays and bottlenecks that hamper workflow and increase processing time. This helps in reducing operating costs, improved capacity utilization and improved quality and service levels.

Below are some key areas:

• Training - It is very important to train employees for achieving and sustaining productivity levels. It yields consistent results and improves the product quality. Trained employees follow proper methods and procedures while doing their tasks. This leads to higher productivity levels. More importantly, these levels are then sustained over time. In addition, it provides management with an effective tool to evaluate associates who have been brought up to common level by training.

• Communicate effectively - Clearly communicating to workers you’re organizational goals and the processes to achieve them. When managers fail to create an environment of open and clear communication, employee productivity suffers, resulting in high turnover and wasted resources.
• Involve, align, and empower your associates - The people who do the work every day are process experts who know how to reduce or eliminate waste. Aligning your managers and staff to a company culture committed to inquiry, responsibility, partnership, and customer satisfaction can significantly impact productivity.
• Educate your leadership - to ask the right questions, gather necessary information, make decisions, and take appropriate, corrective action. This is vital to improving processes, products, and services.

So many times I hear that if you pay the right wage, and provide the right training, then that’s all you need to engage your employees. This is simply not true. Well-paid employees might not leave right away, but they won’t be fully engaged with your organization. They may not admit it outright, but we are all human beings, and for the most part, we want to know how we’re doing and that someone really cares about us.

It is also important to recognize motivation as a separate concept from employee engagement.  Money serves to motivate, but if employees are not engaged with the brand that is motivating them, their performance will not be optimized to best serve the customer.

Pay is important, but culture may mean more. Compensation and benefits are always ranked highly by employees when evaluating satisfaction with their jobs. However, there is increased evidence that corporate culture and relationships with co-workers and managers are held in higher esteem by workers

As organizations continue to be apprehensive about the potential skills gap in the future, it is important to empower employees with the resources they need to be successful in their roles. One possible option to prevent a shortage of skilled workers is to incorporate an internship program into the organization’s succession planning.

Expanding and improving employees’ skills and knowledge through professional development helps them master their duties and responsibilities in their current role. Professional development can encompass various learning opportunities, such as formal and informal training and attainment of certifications or degrees. Organizations that dedicate a portion of their budget to professional development send a message that they invest in their employees. Additional benefits of professional development include personal development and greater opportunities for career advancement.

Job-specific training can help employees develop their talents, empowering them to become more effective and engaged in their roles. Employees expanded knowledge could lead to enhanced organizational processes and increased productivity. Employees may be likely to associate their perception of their supervisor with their overall attitude toward their organization. In fact, management issues are one of the major sources driving up employee turnover, which emphasizes multiple implications the employee/management relationship has on an organization. Poor management has widespread consequences, ranging from diminished employee morale and reduced productivity to damage to an organization’s reputation. Developing effective communication practices and respecting employees’ work and opinions help build better relationships between managers and their staff. These efforts indicate that management has a vested interest in their employees.

Management’s communication of the organization’s goals and strategies has a significant impact on the organizational culture. As organizational plans and strategies may shift, it is important to effectively communicate any adjustments in business objectives and the organization’s vision. It is also helpful to reiterate organizational goals even if they remain unchanged because consistent messages promote unity and employee morale. A transparent organization supports open communication lines, which can stimulate creativity and innovation through collaboration. One-way conversations imply managerial announcements or demands rather than dialogue and may stifle a healthy work environment, resulting in employees feeling isolated or “in the dark.”

Positive relationships with co-workers can foster a sense of loyalty, camaraderie and moral support and engagement among staff. These bonds may boost overall results and productivity as employees are more likely to want to avoid disappointing their teammates and to remain a cohesive team, especially when faced with adversity. Creating a more pleasant working environment through relationships with co-workers can increase employee satisfaction.

Remember, the environment you provide for your employees will be the level of service they provide to your customers. Remember the following:

• Do not let people be scared of taking risks or making mistakes.
• Let people make gut reactions about what to do.
• Let them improve their own decision making skills.
• Give them the freedom to be creative in reaching solutions.

If you can create this environment for them, they will be more productive, they will provide a better service, your customers will be more satisfied, and your business will improve.