Employee engagement plays a significant role in the success of your organization. The more engaged your team is in the day to day operations and long term goals of your company the better chance you will achieve your objectives year after year.
But, the reality is that employee engagement is difficult. The harsh truth is that a large portion of your team is not engaged and is more focused on what is in it for them. They are mainly concerned about getting their pay at the end of the week and only doing what they need to in order to avoid confrontation.
In other words, they are just going through the motions.
The Core Elements of Employee Engagement
Obviously, leaders want a team of engaged and active employees to successfully carry out the company goals and objectives. While getting everyone on the same page may sometimes feel like an impossible task, you can certainly improve engagement.
There are certain elements that drive employee engagement and leaders need to focus on implementing these elements into the work environment to get more out of their team.
Elements include:
- Improve overall well-being: Leaders need to improve the overall atmosphere of their work environment. This can be accomplished by working to eliminate the negative components of your workplace such as unnecessary stresses, fears, obstacles, gossip and anything else that gets in the way of doing their job successfully.
- Make work meaningful: There is nothing worse than going to work every day with the feeling that what you are doing has little or no impact. Leaders need to make each person’s role meaningful by defining how a person positively assists in achieving company goals and objectives.
- Leverage employee strengths: Working to a person’s strength is important. Leverage your team so that you can get the most out of each person, even if this means that individual roles shift or evolve. Maximizing talent will engage your team and help your company be more productive.
- Build relationships that foster engagement: The importance of the social component of the work environment often gets overlooked by leaders because they tend to be focused on the bottom line, not to mention trying to balance their time and attention. Leaders get the most out of their team when they take the time to build strong relationships with team members both on a personal and professional level.
- Recognize achievements in a genuine way: People want to be recognized for their efforts. But, the standard employee of the month award is not as effective as a genuine token of appreciation. Often it is that five minute chat after a long day when you recognize the hard work an individual is committing that gets them to fully buy in and engage in what the company is trying to achieve.
- Track progress: There is no incentive for an employee to be fully engaged and try to maximize their performance if there is no way to track and recognize their contribution. This is why it is important to establish a method to track performance. People are more likely to engage when they know their efforts are being tracked, especially when they are being compared to others.
If these core elements of engagement are not in place, it will be difficult for leaders to inspire their team and get the most from them. Provide your team with reasons to engage by implementing these core elements.
