Keeping Employees Engaged

By Daniel Bobinski

What if I told you that only about 32 percent of U.S. workers claimed to be engaged in their work? Would you be surprised? According to a recent Gallup poll, it’s true. They also found that approximately 18 percent of workers are actively disengaged. Even though these are national averages, companies with numbers like this run the risk of dealing with damaging problems.

What follows are some common negative impacts that can occur when workers are disengaged. If you find that any of these exist in your workplace, be sure to read on to see what can be done to improve things.

Diminished Work Output and Quality

When employees aren’t engaged, they’re less likely to do their best. This can result in lower quality work and lower levels of productivity. Disengaged employees also exhibit less enthusiasm and they avoid challenges. This can lead to stagnation in organizational growth.

Increased Employee Turnover

An atmosphere in which employees are disengaged often leads to an attitude that the grass is greener somewhere else. This leads to higher turnover rates and that gets quite expensive. In talking with HR specialists in multiple industries, I’ve found their typical perspective is to look at how much money an employee was earning annually, and that will be the approximate cost of replacing that employee.

Furthermore, high turnover rates can adversely affect team morale, and that brings its own set of expensive, cascading problems.

Decreased Client Satisfaction

Employee engagement has a direct bearing on client satisfaction and revenue. Since disengaged employees are less likely to provide exceptional customer service, this can lead to reduced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The Need to Keep Employees Engaged

Solid employee engagement affects production, quality, staff retention and client satisfaction for the better. Knowing this, one would think that companies would go all out to ensure all their employees are plugged in. Unfortunately, many reasons can exist for why companies don’t do this, but one of them is often because nobody ever taught managers and supervisors how to do it.

If managers and supervisors are looking for a reason to get employees engaged, the financial incentive alone should be a solid reason. According to Gallup’s comprehensive analysis, business units or work teams with the highest levels of employee engagement exhibited a 21 percent higher profitability rate compared to those in the lowest quartile. Additionally, companies boasting highly engaged workforces have a 17 percent higher productivity rate than average.

5 Ways to Get Employees Plugged In

What follows are five things managers and supervisors can do to help employees become and remain engaged in their work. Obviously, people will need competitive financial compensation, but look over the list that follows and choose two or three that you think you can do better to help improve your work environment. Then start doing them. Even if you believe your workforce is currently engaged, there’s always room for improvement.

1. Connect employees to your organization’s mission and values

This requires a genuine curiosity on your part. It’s hard to know the personal and/or professional motivations for each employee on your team if you’re not genuinely curious. As the saying goes, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

But to connect the motivations of each person with the organization’s mission and values, you’ll also need to know your company’s mission and values – by heart. People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and if your team members don’t see that in you, they aren’t usually inclined to plug in themselves.

Also, this can’t be a one-and-done. Mission and values need to be communicated and connected clearly and consistently.

2. Provide opportunities for growth

Skill development is a huge draw for many people, so provide opportunities for training and cross-training. This not only gives people a sense of pride and accomplishment, it also makes your workforce stronger and more capable. Growth opportunities also come when someone is given responsibility over a special project. Anything that increases a person’s sense of responsibility, ownership and autonomy is usually helpful.

3. Build trust

Trust is a critical component of employee engagement, and you build trust by being trustworthy. This includes being transparent, communicating openly, and following through on commitments. If employees see you as deceptive or duplicitous, trust drops and so does engagement. So keep promises. Express appreciation. Listen with empathy. Give genuine compliments. Also provide help and assistance when you see it is needed. There’s much more that can be done to build trust, but this list is a good start.

4. Provide regular feedback and recognition

Providing feedback and recognition could easily be listed as actions that build trust, but employees who receive regular feedback and recognition are reinforced and empowered to stay on the right track, so it does much more than build trust. Whether it’s through one-on-one conversations or in team meetings, recognition and feedback help provide the guidance that helps people want to remain successful. In addition to feedback, recognition can be given through awards, bonuses or public acknowledgement.

Just be sure that your feedback is specific and timely. Saying something like, “You’re doing good work” during an annual performance review is fairly useless, as it is neither specific nor timely.

5. Foster a positive work environment

This suggestion requires you to first define a positive work environment. Believe it or not, asking employees their opinion on this goes a very long way. That said, several things to consider include efforts on the part of management that enable a good work-life balance and encourage teamwork. This can include flex schedules (if possible), such as allowing people to swap workdays if an important family event is coming.

For example, doing what’s possible to ensure employees can attend their children’s school or sporting events helps establish a work-life balance, as does providing health and wellness programs and resources for mental health. Good training on conflict resolution helps with both home life and work life.

Bottom line, bad employee engagement can be really bad, and good employee engagement can be really good. And nine times out ten, it’s the supervisors and managers who set the tone for which direction it’s going to take.

Daniel Bobinski, who has a doctorate in theology, is a best-selling author and a popular speaker at conferences and retreats. For more than 30 years he’s been working with teams and individuals (1:1 coaching) to help them achieve excellence. He was also teaching Emotional Intelligence since before it was a thing. Reach him by email at DanielBobinski@protonmail.com or 208-375-7606.