A Leader’s Role In Increasing Employee Engagement Jeremy Felder
In today’s business environment, strong employee engagement is essential to help drive a company to success. Organizations rely on their employees to exhibit energy, commitment, and engagement. Although an engaged workforce is one of a company’s most important assets, it doesn’t easily happen.
3 Types Of
Employees In any organization, you will find three types of employees- engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged. Engaged employees are those who are committed to the organization and invest their time and energy into their role. Not engaged employees are satisfied with their role but don’t often go beyond what is required. Lastly, actively disengaged employees are negative and create a toxic environment.
Of the three types, not engaged employees comprise the majority of the workforce (67%). These employees can present both a threat and an opportunity. With the right approach not engaged employees can be transformed into engaged employees who succeed within the organization. To ensure that your employees avoid becoming disengaged employees, leaders need to take the initiative in promoting engagement.
Put Employees in the Right Role The first step that managers or leaders can take is to put everyone in the right role. An employee’s skills and goals should be reflective of their role. If employees are put in a role that is too challenging or not challenging enough, it may be easy for them to resent the organization.
Provide Training to Everyone Without building a culture of trust and accountability, improving employee engagement will be more challenging to execute. Providing the proper training to every employee will help ensure that your team is set up for success.
Assign Meaningful Work After providing your employee with the right role and proper training, ensure you are providing meaningful work. Meaningful work is one of the top factors that influence an employee’s job satisfaction and engagement. With a stronger sense of meaning, employees will feel more committed and produce great results.
Give Feedback With your employees satisfied in their roles and with the work they are doing, don’t forget to check in with them. Relying on a mid-year and yearly reviews to gauge employee performances is an outdated method that offers little response. Regular feedback helps employees gain a better perspective on what areas they excel and what areas they need to work on.
Be Transparent Above all, leaders need to be transparent in their approach to improving engagement in the workplace. Engagement in the workplace should be an active and ongoing discussion that everyone, no matter their role, can contribute to.
Keeping these simple principals in mind will help curate engaged employees that are happy to come to work every day and contribute to the overall success of an organization.