10 Strategies to Make a Positive Impact on Employee Engagement

Employees are the lifeblood of an organization. How they interact within your company and with your customers directly correlates to a company’s success. Therefore, when organizations improve employee engagement, their business thrives.

Employee engagement, or the enthusiasm and dedication employees feel toward their employer, is crucial in creating a positive and productive work environment. When employees are involved and participate in the work, they are more likely to contribute their best efforts, stay committed to their roles, and positively impact the organization’s overall success.

Finding ways to get employees involved and excited about their work can seem complex and perhaps hopeless. However, for most people, engagement depends on connection and mutual respect, which can be simple to improve.

So, whether you find yourself in an overhaul of your company culture or just looking for some new ways to involve your employees, I’ve compiled a list of proven strategies that can make a positive impact on employee engagement.

1. Communicate Openly

Regular and transparent communication is essential for engaging employees. Hold team meetings, provide updates on company goals and progress, and encourage open dialogue. Keep employees feeling heard, valued, and informed about the organization’s direction.

2. Provide Feedback and Recognition

Regularly providing constructive feedback and recognition acknowledges employees’ efforts and achievements and reinforces their value to the organization. Recognizing individual and team accomplishments publicly boosts team morale and motivation. 

3. Foster a Positive Work Environment

Create a positive work environment that fosters engagement and supports employee well-being. That can include encouraging teamwork, collaboration, and positive relationships among colleagues, as well as promoting work-life balance and offering programs that support employee wellness.

4. Offer Professional Development Opportunities

Offer training programs, workshops, or mentorship opportunities that align with employees’ interests and career goals. Providing opportunities for growth and development will demonstrate your investment in the value and potential of your employees.

5. Delegate Meaningful and Challenging Tasks

Empower employees by delegating tasks that are meaningful, challenging, and aligned with their skills and interests. By providing autonomy and responsibility, you can ignite their passion and motivation for their work.

6. Encourage Innovation and Creativity

Foster a culture of innovation and creativity by providing platforms for sharing ideas, implementing new initiatives, and recognizing innovative contributions. This can re-engage disengaged employees by giving them a sense of ownership and purpose.

7. Recognize (And Address) Work-Related Stress

Disengagement can often be a result of work-related stress. Take the time to identify the sources of stress in the workplace and implement strategies to address them. This could involve workload adjustments, improving work processes, and providing resources to support employees’ mental health.

8. Promote Work-Life Balance

Help employees achieve a healthy work-life balance by promoting flexible work arrangements, encouraging employees to take breaks and use vacation time, and prioritizing self-care. A balanced lifestyle can improve engagement and overall well-being.

9. Foster a Sense of Belonging

Create a sense of belonging by promoting inclusivity and diversity within the organization. Encourage employees to share their perspectives, ideas, and experiences by fostering a supportive and inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued and respected.

10. Lead By Example

Leading by example shows that you value and appreciate your employees. Demonstrating enthusiasm, passion, and commitment can inspire employees to engage and become more invested in their work.

Engagement isn’t something companies do just to make employees feel happy. It’s a business strategy for success.

To be successful, organizations need engaged employees because they’re enthusiastic and invested in their work. And feeling positive about their work leads to better physical and mental health.

Decades of Gallup research shows that highly engaged workplaces claim 41% lower absenteeism, 40% fewer quality defects and 21% high profitability.

The bottom line is engaged employees produce better work because they’re happier and they feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.  

Improve Engagement With One Meaningful Conversation Weekly

Employees in the U.S. continue to feel detached from work, according to research firm Gallup's most recent employee engagement survey. Only 33 percent of employees were engaged, while 16 percent of workers reported being actively disengaged according to the survey.

Gallup presents an insightful solution.

"A manager having one meaningful conversation per week with each team member develops high-performance relationships more than any other leadership activity," writes Gallup. The research firm says such conversations can be as short as 15 minutes.

One meaningful conversation per week.

In just five words, Gallup describes the biggest key to employee engagement, an emotionally intelligent habit that you can use to help make your employees feel needed, wanted, and motivated.

What does a meaningful conversation look like? After analyzing the data,

Gallup outlined the top five characteristics of what it calls "meaningful conversations," namely:

1. Recognition or appreciation for recent work.

2. Collaboration and relationships

3. Current goals and prioritization

4. Regular and brief sessions

5. Emphasizing strengths

This aligns with my beliefs and experience with 1-on-1 meetings. These 1-on-1 meetings are crucial to the success of your company. Think about it. 1-on-1 meetings are a tool used to help your employees succeed, which directly impacts how well your company performs. Without these meetings, you’d have directionless, disengaged employees — which isn’t good for team morale or accomplishing goals.

There are 5 ways your managers can improve their engagement when it comes to 1-on-1 meetings.

1. Don’t skip the 1-on-1

Rule number one of 1-on-1s: never skip them. It doesn’t matter how busy your management team gets. A 1-on-1 that’s regularly skipped or rescheduled indicates to the employee that they’re not a priority. And that fosters feelings of indifference, which can cause disengagement. Reschedule meetings if needed. 

2. Be prepared

Want to have a useless meeting? Well, if you don’t prepare before you come to the table, it’s more or less guaranteed to be — let’s be frank — a waste of time.

It’s obvious to an employee when their manager is unprepared for a meeting. And that reflects poorly on the entire company. It makes an employee feel like their manager doesn’t care, which has a devastating effect on their employee experience.

3. Actively listen

Listening may not come naturally to everybody. The 1-on-1 is a great opportunity to brush up on this skill. Remember, the 1-on-1 is all about the employee, so give them a chance to speak.

Start the meeting by asking how the employee is doing. This helps you understand what to focus on during the meeting. It also gives you a quick temperature check of how the employee is thinking or feeling.

4. Avoid status updates.

When a manager or team member says they don't see the value of effective 1 on 1 meetings, it's a virtual certainty they spend most of the meeting talking about projects and status updates. That's a huge waste.

For managers, it can be so tempting: they finally have a chance in an otherwise hectic week to talk to you about your work. If you're on a big team, this may be one of the few times they meet with you alone.

If they feel out of the loop, then they'll want to talk to you about projects to feel like they know what's going on.  It's also a super safe topic to fill the time, and avoid tough, sometimes uncomfortable, subjects that really matter.

5. Coaching

After going over the progress update, spend the rest of the time coaching. In order to do this correctly, it’s important for managers to understand their report’s motivations and long-term goals. That way managers can offer relevant advice and guide them in the right direction.

One important thing to keep in mind when coaching is making sure to ask open-ended questions so employees are mentally engaged. Don’t talk at them; that is not how anyone learns. Challenge them to think critically and solve the problem first before you offer a solution.

The key to good 1-on-1 meetings is doing them. Don’t worry if you don’t nail it straight away. There are many things you will learn along the way that are specific to your company and the individual humans involved. Regularly sharing your thoughts and feedback is your most powerful tool for making great 1-on-1s happen.

Employee engagement is critical to your organization’s success; give the weekly conversations and the tips above a try. Remember, you don't have to incorporate all five of these characteristics every time you meet. (Try focusing on one or two at a time.)

The 3 Things That Keep People Feeling Motivated At Work

As part of TED’s ‘How to be a Better Human’ series, two researchers, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, developed an idea called ‘self-determination theory’. Self-determination theory essentially argued that people are motivated when they can determine for themselves what to work on and how to work on it.

Below, I’ll outline the three main drivers of motivation according to self-determination theory — autonomy, competence, and relatedness — and I’ll provide practical ways to leverage the power of each.

1) Autonomy

This refers to how much people feel they can influence the work they do or control the output and outcome. It outlines how much say a person has in the way they do something.

The opposite, of course, is being micro-managed. If micro-management is about being told what to do and how to do it, autonomy is getting the person involved in deciding how it’s going to be done and showing creative initiative to get there.

·        Analyze how many times you ‘tell’ people what to do, versus how many times you ‘involve’ them in decision-making.

·        Mutually assign tasks and objectives for people, identifying and agreeing deadlines

·        Give them more freedom on how the task is completed, within certain guidelines.

·        Communicate the progress people are making to achieve the goals they are set.

2) Competence

We’ve always stated that a vital aspect of people’s drive is to learn, grow and develop. Becoming ‘better at stuff’ is one of the keys to motivation, so assist and support in helping team members to develop their skills.

·        Limit the amount of constructive criticism you offer. The research showed there were links between poor feedback mechanisms and poor motivation.

·        Share successes with people so they can see how much they’ve grown by taking more responsibility.

·        Give positive feedback when you can, specifying exactly what you are happy with so it can be repeated.

·        Look for opportunities to get your people learning and developing on the job, not just on training courses.

3) Relatedness

The research showed that, when people feel a connection between what they do and the bigger picture they are serving, there is an increase in motivation.

·        Ensure team members have opportunities to connect with others, even on a virtual basis.

·        Show people how the role they play interacts and contributes to others’ work, hence reducing the impacts of silos within the business.

·        Create a connection between their role and the mission of the organization.

·        Allow people to interact with each other more, so the feeling of belonging is enhanced.

Relatedness refers to the sense of feeling worthwhile and being able to contribute to the overall goals of each other as well as the company. You can naturally see how and why this would be a key driver of motivation.

When people have the ability to determine how they work, the means to judge their progress and the feeling that their work helps other people, they can’t help but be motivated to get to work.

Understanding the Exodus: Why Younger Generations Are Leaving Your Workplace

Image Source: Pexels

Whether you’re a new leader or an experienced one, there’s always more to learn. This is especially true if you don’t get formal leadership training — which most leaders don’t.

In one study, almost half of leaders with 10 or more years of management experience said they’d had nine total hours of training, and 43% of new managers with less than a year of experience had no training at all.

As a leader, it’s important to understand that many times, overcoming key challenges in your leadership style is up to you. The good news is that there are many ways to identify and address challenges as you move toward leadership excellence.

Here are some key challenges to watch for and how to overcome them.

Identifying Your Natural Tendencies

Everyone has a default way of responding to situations. For example, some people respond to stress with confidence and even aggression, while others think things through before acting, and others freeze and struggle to manage their emotions.

Interestingly, your genetics may have a lot to do with your default reactions. Studies have found that hereditary traits can impact everything from aggression and anxiety to risk tolerance. Knowing your natural tendencies in different work situations allows you to know where you’re starting and what changes you might want to make.

Of course, you’re not stuck with what you inherited — you can always work on your default behaviors to improve your responses. However, it takes intentionality and practice, so be patient with yourself. Overcoming these built-in reactions is challenging!

Balancing Confidence and Humility

Many leaders understand the importance of seeming confident — it inspires confidence in their teams. However, too much confidence without humility can turn people off. You don’t want to come off as an arrogant leader.

How can you balance confidence with humility? Start by understanding your strengths but also your weaknesses. It’s important to know your limits and surround yourself with people who are strong in the areas where you are lacking. People will trust you more when you’re honest about what you can do and what other people are better suited for.

In recent years, employers have witnessed a growing trend — younger generations, specifically, millennials and Gen Z, are leaving their workplaces at an alarming rate. This phenomenon, also referred to as the “Great Resignation,” demands the attention of business leaders who must start enacting more effective changes if they hope to retain their top talent.

Why Millennials and Gen Z Are Instigating the Great Resignation

Though one can argue that every generation has had it hard and that we all have our burdens to carry, millennials and Gen Z have been pushed beyond their limits with stagnant wages, longer working hours, the global pandemic, and skyrocketing inflation.

This younger generation is burnt out, and unlike previous generations, they are not of a mind that one just has to keep their head down and continue working hard because of societal conventions. Instead, millennials and Zoomers have a much more philosophical view of life that prioritizes mental health and demands more from their employers.

Self-care and Prioritizing Mental Health are Top Priority

Because millennials and Gen Z are much more mindful of their mental health, they prioritize self-care. While self-care might seem like something they can do in their personal time when they aren’t working, it actually includes being cognizant of how their job is affecting their mental and physical health.

If the workplace is toxic or if it doesn’t allow for a healthier work-life balance, then they are more than happy to leave and find a better situation elsewhere — and they’re just as happy to do so if they’re feeling stagnant without room to grow.

Empower Employees with Training and Growth Opportunities

Millennials and Gen Z employees want to learn and grow in their careers, and they are prepared to leave employers that don’t offer these opportunities. According to Lorman Education Services, “86% of millennials would be kept from leaving their current position if training and development were offered by their employer, and over 70% of high-retention-risk employees will leave their company in order to advance their career.”

To top that off, Zippia’s statistics indicate that “45% of workers would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development,” and that 59% of employees report no formal workplace training at all.

As such, employers can turn to edtech and VR solutions to continuously uptrain and empower employees to do their jobs better. E-learning modules and gamified training mean that these opportunities are accessible to everyone, no matter where they are located. In manufacturing, one might even turn to VR to simulate on-the-job training without the risks or costs involved in real-life on-site apprenticeships.

Millennials and Zoomers Want a Job With Purpose

Finally, younger generations want more from the companies they work for. These generations tend to do things to derive more meaning from life. This is in part achieved by traveling more, indulging in hobbies, and again, prioritizing self-care, but it’s also about seeking purpose-driven employment.

Millennials and Gen Z aren’t trying to leave the workforce entirely, but if they do have to work, they want their jobs to be more meaningful or impactful. A study from Deloitte found that younger generations are more likely to stay with a company that has a more positive societal and environmental impact, and that makes an effort to create a more diverse and inclusive culture.

How Employers Can Improve Retention Rates with Zoomer and Millennial Workers

One of the best ways to entice younger employees and effect meaningful changes is to go to the source and ask them what they want.

One way to accomplish this is by conducting exit interviews. If your employees are leaving, take the time to sit down with them on their way out and ask them what you could have done differently. A few examples of specific questions you could ask can include:

●       Why are you leaving the company?

●       How do you think the company could improve?

●       How has the company helped you accomplish your professional growth and career goals?

Even if you want to, don’t ask personal questions. Keep it professional and seek answers that will genuinely help you make meaningful changes.

Address Burnout

Another way to improve employee experience and keep up retention rates is to address stress and burnout, or the cause of it. Understandably, there could be any number of things causing burnout, which could vary from one person to the next, but there are typically a few main things that are the cause: a lack of flexible work options, long hours, a lack of benefits, and a lack of boundaries. 

This is where self-care can come into play. To help employees prioritize their physical and mental well-being, you likely need to make some changes, which can include:

●       Encouraging breaks and taking time off when needed

●       Making sure employees are clocking out on time and not working overtime

●       Offering better pay and benefits packages

Focus on Engagement

Employee engagement is one of the best ways to provide more value to employees and the work they are doing. When employees are more engaged, they tend to be more productive and have higher job satisfaction. Employee engagement myths might have you thinking otherwise, but numerous studies have shown that employee engagement matters.

Provide them with more opportunities to learn and grow. Do things that remind your employees that you appreciate them and recognize their hard work. Create a more positive work environment that values open communication, diversity, and inclusion, and aligns with the mission of the company.

Final Thoughts

The Great Resignation isn’t a phase or a passing trend. If employers don’t do more to create a more positive and healthy work environment, millennials and Gen Z will continue to leave workplaces at higher rates. So if you want to avoid losing your top talent to those jobs, you must start making more substantial changes that hold more meaning to today’s generation of workers.

About the Author: Luke Smith is a writer and researcher turned blogger. Since finishing college he is trying his hand at being a freelance writer. He enjoys writing on a variety of topics but technology and business topics are his favorite. When he isn't writing you can find him traveling, hiking, or gaming.

Lean Quote: Create an Energized Workplace

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Organizations should be deliberate in creating opportunities for employees to feel fulfilled in their work."   —  Dr. Alexander Lovell, Director of Research and Data Science at the O.C. Tanner Institute

As organizations continue to adjust to a new era of work and manage the uncertainty of a subsiding global pandemic and looming economic recession, what employees want most: connection, community, and fulfillment. A sense of community is more important now that employees are returning to the office and searching for fulfillment and connection, but unfortunately, many organizations' current programs are failing to meet evolving employee desires.

O.C. Tanner Institute collected and analyzed input from over 36,000 employees, leaders, and practitioners from 20 countries and reports that:

Nearly 1 in 3 employees don’t feel fulfilled at work which makes them:

• 399% more likely to actively look for another job
• 340% more likely to leave the organization within a year
• 47% less likely to put in a great deal of effort to help the organization succeed
• 71% less likely to promote the organization as a great place to work

Each year O.C. Tanner measures changes in the six core elements of workplace culture that together determine employee decisions to join, engage with, and remain at any place of work. They call them Talent Magnets because of their power to attract and connect people to their teams and organizations:

1. Purpose
An organization’s reason for being besides profits. It’s the difference it makes in the world, why the company exists. Employees need to feel connected to the purpose and understand how their job contributes to it. Once they do, their work takes on meaning. Organizations should clearly articulate the connection between work and purpose.

2. Opportunity
The chance to develop new skills, contribute to meaningful work, feel challenged, have a voice, and grow. Opportunity is more than the lure of promotions and pay increases. It’s about preparing and empowering employees to make decisions, inviting them to the table, and offering them projects that will expand their skills and relationships.

3. Success
The thrill of accomplishment, innovation, breaking barriers, playing on a winning team, and experiencing victories. Employees must find success at the individual, team, and organizational levels, and it should be nurtured and publicly celebrated.

4. Appreciation
Feeling valued for one’s contributions and being recognized for one’s worth. Appreciation is essential to employees—people need to know their leaders and peers notice and are grateful for their efforts and contributions. Appreciation is most effective when it’s delivered in timely, personal, and meaningful ways.

5. Wellbeing
Caring about the employee as a whole—their physical, emotional, social, and financial health. Wellbeing ensures employees can be their strongest, most capable, most authentic selves at work. A comprehensive approach to wellbeing requires leaders to create an environment of inclusivity, work-life integration, and connection.

6.  Leadership
The mentoring, coaching, inspiring, and facilitating that allow individuals, teams, and, ultimately, organizations to succeed. Great leaders co-create a shared purpose for their teams and empower their employees to do great work. As the most influential of the six Talent Magnets, leadership cultivates the other five.

Successful organizations are the ones reconnecting with their people by adopting a community mindset where employees find meaning in their work, believe that they belong, and experience greater personal fulfillment.

The Unexpected Benefit of Celebrating Failure

Many people shy away from failure. There’s constant wonder and worry about what will happen to an individual when they fail, especially in their place of work. However, celebrating failure can and often brings unexpected success. I want to share a TedTalk by the Head of X (formerly Google X), Astro Teller, where he introduces the “Moonshot Factory” where his team works to solve the world’s biggest problems, and celebrates failure as a necessity for success.

Here are a few tips from today’s TedTalk:

• Run at the most challenging parts of the problem at hand first. Failures will often lead you to the path of success.
• Shift your perspective. Sometimes shifting your perspective is more powerful than being smart or right.
• Encourage the path of least resistance. Make it a safe space to fail and reward and celebrate failures. This can come in the form of hugs, high-fives, applause, promotions, or even bonuses.

Encouraging teams to take on only the most ambitious projects and allowing them to fail at them is what leads to profoundly amazing things. At X, that means celebrating teams that kill their good projects. These teams are applauded, literally, in front of the rest of the organization. They receive bonuses and vacations for recognizing that their project will fail to be great. And for newcomers to X, this can all seem a little odd.

But as a leader, Teller considers himself a “culture engineer” and believes strongly in the power of social norms. Creating a set of social norms that promote psychological safety is key to getting the best from your team. Teller said that most teams “don't think it's safe to tell you that the business plan that you asked them to make isn't really great. It's just good. Wouldn't that be amazing if they would actually tell you that, because you don't want them working on something that's good but not great. You want to unleash them, but you have to know first. And you're not operationally enough in the details to even know. They're the only people who really know.”

I hope that this TedTalk inspires you to celebrate your failures and to create an environment that encourages the path of least resistance. 

5 Ways to Engage Your Managers

There are numerous studies on the relationship between managers and employees regarding engagement. It is quite notable that most of the google searches focus on employee engagement. Or on what a manager can do to increase employee engagement.

But what about the managers? What if they are disengaged?

According to the Gallup Business Journal, 70% of the variance in team engagement across business units is explained by the quality of the manager. In other words, engagement is a management issue.

And this makes sense. Employees naturally gauge their connection and engagement with an organization through their local relationships and environments. And no one has a greater influence on those day-to-day interactions, processes, and operations than the managers on the ground with them.

Great leaders show their employees what they need to do, both to succeed in the business and help the business succeed. Engaging managers are highly motivated, efficient, collaborative and, most importantly, nurture engaged employees. 80% of employees with a higher level of trust in their management are more committed to the business. Engaged managers understand they represent their company and its values, and are committed to achieving any objectives that align with those.

Organizations need to understand what managers are doing in the workplace- build or break the engagement.

Many of the techniques that boost employee engagement often work for managers too. Thus, instead of firing your disengaged managers, look at the following methods of engaging managers.

1. Improve Communication and Growth and Development Opportunities.

The majority of managers will never accept that they are bad communicators. We take communication skills in managers for granted.

And for a manager, it might be a little humiliating to be advised to get some training to develop their necessary communication skills. However, communication training is a great option to improve their expertise.

But, it is not just for their communication skills. Managers need overall growth and development opportunities, provided these options to promote loyalty, and generate motivation.

2. Practice Empathy with them.

The key to cultivating managers' quality and improving their engagement with the organization is to show empathy for them. We often provide empathy training and urge the managers to practice it. But unless we understand the hardship of managers, the initiative would fall on deaf ears.

Thus, we should aim to instill empathy in managers by exercising compassion with them. We should seek managerial feedback and learn from mistakes while keeping confidence in the business.

3. Foster Engagement through Collaboration.

Collaborating managers are the first to be selected for intricate tasks requiring inter-departmental teamwork. Thus, instilling collaborative and engagement skills in managers is essential.

Again, collaboration and engagement are practically synonyms. So a perfect way to promote engagement is to collaborate with managers.

4. Build Transparency.

There are times when it is not possible to reveal any corporate strategies. But unless it causes any security issue, you should be as transparent as possible with your managers. You should explain why you cannot reveal some data at present. We should share the targets, objectives, and current performance reviews of the company with the managers.

5. Create a Culture of Recognition.

The longer managers take to recognize team members, the less likely employees will recognize them as engaged managers. Thus, it is a two-way process. To get recognized, managers should first learn the art of recognizing their engaged employees. On the other hand, employees should recognize managers for everything positive they do in the workplace.

Managers are often saddled with the task of raising engagement rates among their teams by senior leadership. After all, leaders often assume those managers know their teams best and have such a strong impact on the daily employee experience - shouldn't they be accountable for engagement?

But since such a small portion of managers are engaged themselves (just 35% according to this Gallup survey), asking them to take on the task of engaging employees when they're disengaged doesn't set anyone up for success.

Instead, it's better to raise the engagement levels of managers themselves if you have a significant employee engagement problem at your workplace. Those efforts will pay off in spades as both your managers and their teams become increasingly engaged at work.