What do your employees cost your business? What value do they contribute? 100%? 75%? More, or less?
In what way do they contribute to the success of your business:
- Physically, with their presence?
- Intellectually, with their minds engaged?
- Motivationally, ‘going the extra mile’?
- Emotionally, with their heart, mind and soul?
| What your people do | Level of engagement |
|---|---|
| Turn up, turn up on time, and do what they are contracted to do | Physical |
| Use their mind and use their initiative | Intellectual |
| Use their discretionary effort and ‘go the extra mile’ | Motivational |
| Sing the praises of your business outside work – recommend their own grandmother work for you – both advocate and ambassador | Emotional |
In the first instance we need people to ‘deliver’ according to their contract of employment: we want people turning up, turning up on time, and doing willingly and well that which they are contracted to do. This is a good start. But don’t we want more?
There is plenty of evidence linking employee engagement with high performance – however you define high performance – whether customer care, quality, or productivity – all of which contribute to sustainable business and greater profitability.
Do you and or your managers have the knowledge, skills and confidence to lead your people? Let us explode the myth that leaders are born – leaders of people are made – and self-made, as leadership is ‘a reciprocal arrangement between those who decide to lead and those who choose to follow’. Any one can develop their leadership capability with a little professional help.
So let’s get people doing the basics, then ‘move them up the food chain’, through our example and our leadership.
Here are ten top tips for engaging your people and elevating their level of engagement ‘up the food chain’
- Regular informal ‘one-to-ones’ with a relevant and engaging agenda
- Communicating a clear and engaging sense of purpose
- Formal performance appraisal – and aligning individual objectives with the purpose of the business
- Formal personal development reviews – and aligning individual learning and development needs, and career opportunities, with the purpose of the business
- Team Briefings – that communicate up (questions and views from staff), down (information), across (not just a cascade) and down again (questions answered and demonstrate staff views have been heard)
- Situational Leadership – ‘different strokes for different folks’ at different levels of their individual development and for each individual’s different time of life – supporting staff through change
- Skill-up first line of management to set the standards of conduct, performance and behaviour, to motivate and support people to meet the standards – but also to deal with poor performance or inappropriate or behaviour issues quickly and effectively – and making sure front line managers role model the behaviours we expect of our staff
- Annual or biennial staff attitude surveys
- Employee voice – mechanism/s for individuals to make their views known in a non-attributable manner
- Contracts, policies and procedures that support the behaviours you want to see in your staff, together with pay and reward mechanisms that create a clear ‘line of sight’ between individual behaviours and business success
