Steps Leaders Can Take To Improve Employee Engagement

With an understanding of how impactful this profitability killer really is to our organizations, it’s time we look at the specific steps we can take as leaders to drive employee engagement and eliminate the costs of a disengaged workforce! Make no mistake here, the improvement in productivity that’s said to come from increased engagement is just one of the areas where we’ll capture profit… I’m so convinced that employee engagement ties directly to attracting and retaining great team members that we built a lesson called How to Make Sure Working for You Doesn’t Suck into our Recruitment, Retention, & Culture course for leaders at all levels of their organizations. As I shared before, I believe it’s in every leader’s best interest to have simple processes in place to earn buy-in and engagement from their teams in every interaction, as a group and individually.

I’ll say it once more so there’s no misunderstanding my point: I’m not knocking any one of these things. I’d argue that all of them are absolutely critical for anyone in a leadership role, but I could also make a strong case showing that they each need to be very targeted to yield any level of increase in employee engagement…

The Six Ways Leaders Can Boost Employee Engagement detailed in the other Forbes article provided more specific detail on what action to take;

1. Leaders should share the vision, goal and strategy of the company with employees and involve employees in decision-making on issues that affect their work.
2. Leaders should discuss each employee's job description and how it ties to the business goals.
3. Employee performance should be evaluated regularly. Employees' area of strengths should be recognized and leveraged.
4. Exemplary employee performance should be recognized, appreciated and rewarded with an incentive.
5. Leaders should have an open-door policy, and every employee should be encouraged to speak up about their questions or concerns.
6. Leaders should ask for upward feedback so that employees can let them know about their leadership performance.

While these are quite a bit more specific on what needs to be done,  I maintain that a shorter list coupled with a crystal-clear understanding of exactly how we can apply that list every single day can produce better results ten times out of ten; the more steps we need to keep up with, the less likely we are to get it done!

When it comes to providing our teams with something they can easily measure, a purpose they can connect with, and an understanding that they’re an important part of the process, we’ll be well on our way to earning the increased discretionary effort, and ultimately the improved individual performance, that’s so closely tied to higher engagement. With that in mind, let’s look at how simple doing each of these can be…

Miserable Employees Aren’t Engaged…

When I mention making sure our team members can measure their performance, have a clear understanding of its relevance, and know their significance in the process, it doesn’t sound all that hard - and it’s not! But don’t mistake this simplicity for something that requires no effort at all… The magic in each of these things comes when we can personalize them to meet the needs of each individual on our team!

In all those years I worked in manufacturing, I can’t think of many things we didn’t measure at one time or another. The Fitbit wasn’t mainstream yet so I don’t recall ever logging heart rates or zone minutes but there were numerous scenarios where we counted steps… Like many large organizations, us minions at the plant level had the opportunity to receive quarterly and year end bonuses based on whether or not our facility met a certain set of metrics. With all those things we measured on any given day and those bonuses in place, one could assume that the immeasurability that Lencioni said contributes to a miserable job would never be an issue - and one would be very wrong…

The simple act of measuring or recording data has little to do with driving engagement when those things we’re measuring have nothing to do with our behavior. If I can’t directly connect my contribution, be that for good or for bad, to the results that are being measured or are tied to those bonuses, it’s tough to really buy into the idea. Be honest here, how many times have you had to log and analyze data that you had no control over? How much did that motivate you to give it every ounce of energy you had? Through nearly two decades of quarterly and year end meetings reviewing plant financials and receiving news on whether or not we’d be receiving a bonus payout (after it was ravaged by taxes), I don’t know that I was ever able to connect what I did on a daily basis to the result. Don’t get me wrong, I still did my best every day I showed up but that was not driven by the clarity that can come from being about to measure how our individual efforts impact the overall goals. All that said, I have no doubt that measuring things that were within my control, things that I could connect directly to the overall goals, would have resulted in at least a slight increase in my effort. The real key in making things measurable is in keeping it personal - tying those measurements directly to the things our team members are doing daily.

With regards to relevance, I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who wants to work hard just for the sake of working hard. Having a clear purpose is critical. Knowing the effort we put into something makes a slight difference in the final product can help but having complete clarity around why every meticulous step we need to follow in a tedious process matters to every other individual involved, as well as the end user, is often what separates good enough from excellence! I remember having to measure parts I was making through a stamping press to ensure the pattern fell within a certain tolerance. The range was fairly broad so staying within the tolerance was easy enough. In most cases, I didn’t need to adjust anything from model to model to maintain the tolerance. When I learned how much more productive the folks responsible for the next step in the process could be when I make sure those parts were at one end of the tolerance - exactly - every single time, I was able to make a slight change in how I did my job that helped them achieve remarkably better results with a lot less effort. That change required a little more time in my set up but I saw purpose in making the adjustment. Not only did it help improve overall quality slightly, I could see how it helped my coworkers immediately. Any time we can tie more relevance to a task, the odds of earning an increase in engagement go up!

To illustrate the final step we can take to remove job misery and earn higher engagement, I’ll start by asking a question: have you ever worked for someone, directly or ever indirectly, who just never got your name right? My name is pretty simple; three letter first name and four letter last name. When someone isn’t sure about the last name, I relate it to the bird, the chocolate, or the soap. Doing this usually draws a chuckle but it also helps solidify it in their mind. I recently had the kid at our grocery pickup beat me to it; I had clearly made an impression… All that said, I’ve seen situations where supervisors, managers, or even coworkers got someone’s name wrong every single time they interacted with that person. In some cases it was as innocent as mispronouncing it. Sometimes though, it was a blatant case of being so self-absorbed that they hadn’t even tried to get it right. Think back to the quote I shared before from Dale Carnegie that ties to this, “a person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” That certainly applies to recruiting and retaining great team members, but it also applies to earning engagement. But to earn even more engagement, it’s not as basic as knowing their name… When we’re willing to invest the time and energy into getting to know about their lives, their families, and even their hobbies, we show they we value them for more than just what they produce - which almost always results in more engagement and higher production!

If we can build each of these simple things into how we interact with our teams, I have no doubt that we’ll be well on our way to earning that big increase in discretionary effort that comes from higher employee engagement and we’ll have yet another profitability killer under control. Before wrapping up this look at addressing the cost of disengaged employees though, there’s one final thing we need to consider...

Tying the Knot on Employee Engagement

In addressing this profitability killer, we’ve worked through the real costs of disengaged employees, we’ve looked at how effective leadership can drive (read: earn) an increased level of engagement, and we just covered three relatively simple (but not necessarily quick or easy) things we can do to remove misery from the job and intentionally build active engagement. While I believe this provides a solid foundation to work from, I don’t think it’s everything we need to consider if we want to create an environment that perpetuates the increased discretionary effort that comes from higher engagement rather than it being a flash in the pan…

In a recent Leading At The Next Level lesson titled The 3 Components to Preparing Credible Leaders, Cindy shared some very specific points that apply to earning ongoing employee engagement just as much as they did to building credible leaders - but I suppose one could make a strong case that very few employees will ever engage if their leader isn’t credible…

The first point that grabbed me was her reference to John Maxwell’s 5 Levels of Leadership, specifically level one; leading (or at least attempting to) based only on a title. While someone carrying a supervisor or manager title may indeed possess the authority to force compliance, they will never achieve widespread engagement throughout their team from that authority alone. Even a slight increase in engagement will require them to move beyond leading based on their position.

Next, she shared something about The Platinum Rule that we looked at here as we addressed how poor communication kills profitability. Cindy said, “The Platinum Rule is never instead of The Golden Rule. It should stand on the shoulders of The Golden Rule!” I’ve explained the idea of The Platinum Rule to thousands of people over the years but I had never considered just how important it is that we apply it to build on rather than in place of… Just think how much stronger our connections can be with those we lead when we do, and how much more engagement that could earn!

Finally, she quoted David Augsberger as saying “Being heard is so close to being loved that, for the average person, the two are almost indistinguishable.” If we want to remove any chance of our team members feeling anonymous, we need to listen at that level! That’s how we learn what really makes them tick as opposed to just who they are. And that’s yet another way of earning the kind of engagement that brings an increase in discretionary effort and yields high individual performance! 

If we can build these simple steps into our daily routines, we’ve made big steps in preventing profit from being killed by disengaged employees - but we can’t do it without setting clear expectations and holding our folks accountable so that’s the profitability killer we’ll work through next!