Employee engagement has always been a big deal in business operations. After all, no tool or system can replace the productivity of your workers as they are the core of the organization. The way they function as a team will make or break your hopes of running a profitable company.
However, it seems like 85% of employees are not engaged in the workplace. There are many ways to explain such behavior, but it all comes down to one simple fact – the lack of leadership. A genuine business leader has to keep an eye on every member of the team and create preconditions for the successful functioning of the organization.
In this article, we will show you nine leadership tools that can help you to inspire employees to give their best. Let’s take a look!
1. Set Clear Goals
If you want to build a team of highly productive employees, you need to define your expectations. What is it that you want them to do? The most important thing is to answer this question and set clear goals for each member of the group and the team in general.
We recommend you to quantify achievements. That way, employees know exactly where to go and how much they have left. But if you make them wander around without a concrete objective or purpose, rest assured their engagement will decrease steadily.
2. Pay What They Are Worth
We could love or hate our jobs, but in the end, it all comes down to earning enough money to make a decent living. This is exactly why you should pay employees what they are worth.
According to the report, more than 40% of employees say a higher salary would improve their job satisfaction. Of course, almost all of them would leave the company in case they received higher compensation somewhere else.
Therefore, a leader should make sure that everybody gets what they deserve. All it takes it to follow the industry average and reward top-performing employees.
3. Provide Training Opportunities
Do you know that the top factors of greater engagement are job-specific training and career development opportunities? We live in a rapidly-changing world where talented professionals expect you to help them grow and develop new skills.
If you don’t want to chase them away, you better provide employees with continuous learning opportunities. Organize seminars, training programs, study visits, and all other types of learning sessions that can make the members of your team better and more skilled workers.
4. Be a Role Model
A true leader is always a role model who inspires subordinates to work better and harder. If you want employees to work overtime, you have to do the same thing. If you want them to communicate clearly and concisely, you have to showcase the same mindset. You are the one they look up to, so don’t forget to act as a genuine role model.
5. Avoid Micromanagement
Another way to prove leadership skills is to avoid micromanagement. In case you don’t know, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes, controls, and reminds the work of his/her subordinates or employees.
It is always a big burden for every worker because they feel like being under surveillance, so it often leads to professional underperformance. If you find yourself micromanaging, remember that you did not hire high school kids but rather full-time professionals who are better than you in their fields of work.
6. Let Them Speak Freely
A manager who doesn’t listen to his/her team members is never a good leader. Although there are times when you have to make big decisions single-handedly, your employees should contribute to decision-making 99% of the time.
After all, they are most likely talented workers with lots of professional experience, so why wouldn’t you let them speak their minds freely? It will help you to brainstorm alternatives, boost engagement, and improve business results long-term.
7. Show Empathy
Even the best-performing employees have their ups and downs. No one is able to maintain the highest level of personal productivity day after day because it’s just not how the human mind functions. For this reason, you have to show empathy and understand your colleagues when they make a mistake.
First of all, don’t penalize workers for every little blunder. Secondly, try to talk with them and learn what’s going on in their heads. Sometimes the smallest personal problem can significantly jeopardize professional engagement, but it’s a leader’s duty to discover it and help employees to make it through the hard times.
8. Promote Work-Life Balance
Studies reveal that 40% of people use their computers after 10 PM, while 94% of professionals put in 50+ hours a week. These are only some of the stats that prove how diligent and hard-working a typical employee really is these days.
However, it is impossible to go on like that year after year. A leader should give employees a break and encourage the balance between life and work. You can do it simply by allowing team members to take a couple of extra days off work or letting them work from home. You can test many little tricks to increase the quality of employees’ personal lives without degrading business performance.
9. Encourage Employees to Exercise
Physical training can do miracles engagement-wise. According to the research, workday exercise doesn’t only improve well-being but also leads to a 72% improvement in time management and workload completed. All it takes is to create a small gym or sponsor training programs for your staff – it will have an excellent impact on the performance of your team.
Conclusion
People are the essence of each company, but the leader is the person in charge who has to make sure that everyone is doing their jobs professionally. If you want to make the most of your team, then you need to utilize state of the art management principles.
In this post, we discussed nine leadership tools that could help you to inspire employees to give their best. Which tactic do you believe to be the best here?
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