Employee engagement is a hot topic right now in HR departments and within leadership teams. This is not a surprise as data from Gallup’s 2014 research shows that only 13 percent of all employees are “highly engaged” and 26 percent are “actively disengaged”. Employee disengagement has a negative consequence on a company’s bottom line, but engaged employees are happier, are more productive and they are more likely to work at their full potential therefore positively impacting financial outcomes.
So how can you be a leader who moves the needle on employee engagement in your company? Below are some ideas to help kickstart the process.
- Make sure your employees have the ability to master their workload. An employee’s sense of mastery will positively effect their ability to feel impactful. This starts with on-boarding and continues throughout an employee’s career at your company. Trainings, mentorship programs, regular one on one’s with managers are all ways to help employees feel mastery.
- Develop a culture that values professional development. Employees often leave companies because they don’t believe there are any opportunities for them to grow into or challenge them. One way to manage this is by knowing your employees and what they want from their career. Managers should engage their direct reports in career conversations. Once they know what their employees want, they can develop growth plans and help them to find opportunities to challenge them. Be careful about falling into the promotion trap of moving a talented Individual Contributor into a management role because it’s the only avenue for upward mobility. Create different advancement tracks for those who love to do the IC role and those who want to move into management.
- Develop a positive work environment. Bay area companies, especially start-ups, are finding this is key to being competitive as millennials have expectations about the place in which they work. This can include flexible work environment, option to work from home, sense of inclusion and diversity, companywide volunteer days, the ability to take on a project outside of job responsibility, public recognition and wellness opportunities.
- Build alignment and trust around company goals. Employees are more connected to the work they are doing when they aligned with the mission and goals. Involve them in the process of developing these. Help them to understand where their role fits into the bigger picture. Build trust by communicating the goals regularly and being transparent.
How do you know where to begin? It’s important to understand your employees and their experience at work. Gathering anonymous and unbiased feedback on a regular basis is a key step in this process. There are many tools available today in the market to support this. Some of these include: Culture Amp, BlackbookHR, TINYhr and BetterCompany. Employee engagement is not an HR task, it’s a culture shift owned by everyone.
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To work with Danielle on establishing how your company will manage employee engagement, contact her today.