Employee Engagement

I recently read an article about employee engagement and it talked about this business concept as employees being into their jobs.  I would suggest that it is more than just being into their jobs.  It’s about being into the company, the customers, knowing what they do makes a difference and being a part of a team.  It’s management’s job to engage their employees, being a leader on the people side of business, is all about inspiring your team and bringing the best out of your people.

Employee engagement is defined in Wikipedia as:  An "engaged employee" is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organization's interests.  How do you suppose this happens?   By accident, only by certain people or by design?  I guess it can happen each of these ways, but as business owners we would rather see this by design.  Are your managers leading your people or are they managing them?

I’ve seen many statistics on engagement and the numbers continue to be staggering.  In a recent article in the Miami Herald, a survey said that 56% of current employees in the US would stay in their current positions if they were shown some appreciation.  It doesn’t cost management much to give their employees some sincere appreciation, yet it looks like many still don’t.  One of the human relations principles that we work with in our programs is:  Give honest, sincere appreciation.  Changing our behaviour to recognize these kinds of principles is what we do at Dale Carnegie and we pride ourselves on making these kinds of changes in our customer’s business.

Last week we delivered an in-house seminar for a company with all their staff from across the country.   It was a pleasure working with and being around a group that are engaged in their business and the clearly understand the direction of the company and how each individual contributes to this end.  One comment I found interesting is one participant suggested that the Dale Carnegie human relation principles are common sense.  We look at them and say, of course they are, the question is; are they common practice?

Give your fellow co-workers or staff some honest and sincere appreciation!  It works!

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/22/2514942_how-to-say-thanks.html#storylink=addthis

Step up to Leadership – A Key to Employee Engagement

I was recently talking to a business owner that told me that his people were not “engaged”.  I asked him to clarify engagement; I wanted to ensure that our definitions were similar.  His response was that younger people today don’t care about their companies that they work for and they only care about themselves.  These comments puzzled me; I asked how that was different from other employees?  After all we all think of ourselves first?  After a discussion we determined that the issue was not the employees attitudes but rather the inabilities of management to connect with their younger counterparts.  His management team consists of older individuals that are not connecting with the millennial generation.  This is an issue with many organizations and we also see this in sports today.  I recently heard some sports casters suggesting that the old coaching methods are no longer relevant.  Coaches that are tough on players are not inspiring the younger generation; the younger coaches that are connecting with these young millionaires are not using pressure tactics and calling their players out.  If they’re changing their way in sports to get the most out of their team I would suggest that we need to be doing the same in business.

I continued to explain that managers today need to have the skill set to connect with all 4 generations in the workplace.  Never before in our history have we had these 4 generations all in the workplace at the same time.  Our managers need the skills to connect and inspire each of these different groups of people.   They think differently and what motivates them is different.  Leasers are under pressure to lead their teams and people and new tools are needed to connect with their people.

"Tell me what to do, and I'll do it to protect my job." 

 "Make me want to do it, and I'll do it to the best of my ability."

Supervisors who understand this simple truth and know how to implement it are the ones who create impact in today's organizations. Great managers develop high-performance teams that get results because they know how to lead and inspire a team, not just manage it.  

One tool that we offer participants in our Leadership program is what we call an “Innerview”.  This tool gives managers a simple process so that they can connect with their staff.  This tool is often brought up by participants that have gone through the program, they comment that it has been a breakthrough for them and their relationships with others at work.

The “Innerview” is a process of finding out what is important to others, and the questions are based on factual questions, causative questions, the how and why and value-based questions.  The idea of the process is to connect with people at level that they never have in the past and gain a deeper understanding of what is important to them so that as managers we can inspire them.

Try it, you’ll be surprised at the results!!