Thursday, July 26, 2012

3 Ways to improve Employee Engagement ~ John J Arent


Are your employees engaged?  No, not to each other but in their work!  According to a recent study by the Hay Group, "Engaged Teams" are 43% more productive than those who are not.  Quality suffers and there is a real question mark as far as the company's core beliefs and culture is concerned...

I once was in conversation with C level executives of a small company that had high turnover.  The discussions were heated and I remember that the executives were discussing all the wonderful things that they had given their employees who still were not satisfied. Some of the comments were:

“We raised their salaries”…
”We have a great incentive plan”…
”We increased their benefits”…
”They are unappreciative of everything we try to do for them”.

Yet, this company continued to “churn” employees.  T/O rate was approaching 40%.  The problem was not only the high turnover but many of those leaving were good employees.  The question from the group is essence was: “What do these people want from us”?

Never once did the executives look at themselves as a potential source of the problem but rather they chose to “blame” their lost productivity and high turnover on their employees.  Often times, a reflection on the part of management gets into a "We vs. Them"  mode.  My suggestion was not to cast guilt on someone but seek to understand and ENGAGE them in the corporate goals!

Employee engagement can be broken down into 3 somewhat simple steps.  Today I will list those steps and over the next several days, devote the blog to each individual step in depth.  

The three main steps are:

Recognize that you are “imperfect” -  You do not have all the answers!  Show some humility, it goes a long way!
Listen
Be Grateful

That’s it folks, that’s how simple it is to truly engage your employees.  Tomorrow, we will go in depth for each of these steps!

No comments:

Post a Comment