Keeping staff engaged is one of the challenges of the decade. With engagement, staff will become more loyal, more productive, and more connected to their work.
People who are disengaged are more likely to miss work, make mistakes, have conflicts, and cause discontent among other staff because they are not involved and attentive in their work.
Every year brings a new set of challenges for keeping staff engaged. Shrinking resources, generational diversity and conflict, and the generalized stress for today’s worker all contribute to a tendency to disengage. But, there ARE things you can do!
The first thing you can do is start by taking stock of your own engagement. How connected are you to your work, your staff, and your challenges? Begin by taking care of yourself and your own engagement issues. An engaged leader is much more likely to inspire engagement of staff.
Recognition is an important part of engagement. Creating an organization based on strengths, and recognizing people for their strengths, is more effective than focusing on weaknesses. Engaged people are those who operate from their strengths, not their shortcomings.
Most people long to be recognized. Meaningful recognition means that the true contributions and uniqueness of the individual is recognized and honored. The last thing staff want is to be considered one of many nameless and insignificant people who are not valued for their uniqueness and contributions. Recognition need not cost anything, but people should be recognized in private and in public. You might consider even recognizing someone who took a reasonable and well-planned risk to be inventive, even if it failed. This rewards learning and innovative thinking; two things engaged employees will do more of.
Stay in touch with your staff. Ask them questions. Find out what your staff are thinking, and what they are thinking about their jobs. Ask them how you can help them make their job better. Better still, give them the challenge of making their own job better. They’ll have plenty of ideas and they probably won’t cost you anything. Give your staff the tools they need to do their job, if you can. Staff engagement drops off when employees don’t have the resources to do their job well. Since we are learning organizations, it’s vital to our well-being that our staff be well-trained and that their knowledge and skills to do their job are up-to-date. As work forces have shrunk and people have taken on the tasks of others, it has sometimes been the case that they have not been adequately trained. When this happens, the staff can lose the confidence and self-esteem that keeps them engaged. No one wants to be a failure.
It also helps staff if there are clear expectations. Does your staff know what’s expected of them? Have duties and performance benchmarks been clearly articulated?