Engaging your employees is crucial if you want to maximize the impact of your leadership efforts. However, data gathered by Gallup shows that employees continue to feel more disengaged. Today, just 33% of employees are engaged at work as millions struggle to connect to their company’s mission statement and values.
Effective leadership can buck this trend and turn your team into a crew of highly engaged employees. Doing so can dramatically improve your productivity and enhance the morale of your workplace.
Fostering engagement amongst your employees can meaningfully bolster key leadership metrics like net promoter score. High metrics will attract more talented employees to your business and will further enhance your efforts to lead a highly productive, engaged workplace.
Benefits of Engagement
Leading is about far more than conducting performance reviews and delivering motivational speeches. If you want your team to buy into your business vision, you need to focus on enhancing engagement in the workplace. The benefits of high engagement include:
- Increased Retention: People are far more likely to remain loyal to workplaces where they feel they belong. A low turnover / high retention rate can help you save funds that would otherwise be spent on recruitment.
- Enhanced Job Satisfaction: Satisfied employees are more productive than their disenfranchised peers. Even simple engagement tactics — like giving a top performer a shout-out — can improve satisfaction and daily productivity.
- Better Health and Wellbeing: You can’t lead a productive workplace when your team is burnt out and sick. Fostering engagement reduces the risk of burnout by ensuring everyone feels supported and welcome at work.
Leading an engaged workforce can be deeply fulfilling, too. Arriving at work with the knowledge that your team authentically cares about the success of your firm can be a real motivational boon for you as a leader. Doing so ensures you bring a proactive, positive mindset when communicating with your employees.
Creating Communication Channels
Effective communication can aid your efforts to create an engaged, highly motivated workplace. Opening clear lines of effective communication can improve worker well-being, too. Employees benefit from improved social health when they can share their insights in a supportive environment and will be more likely to take criticism on board if they feel safe and secure at work. Additional benefits of improving communication include:
- More opportunities for networking;
- Enhanced engagement in professional development opportunities;
- A better understanding of the challenges your team faces;
- Increased connection with your team on a personal level.
These benefits can enhance employee engagement and help you build a highly motivated workforce. Put simply, employees are far more likely to buy into your vision when they feel heard and are recognized for their hard work.
However, if you want to lead successfully in the workplace of the future, you can’t over-rely on open-door policies and in-person catch-ups. Instead, you must embrace digital communication tools like Zoom, Slack, and Teams. These tools can meaningfully improve the effectiveness of your communication as a leader by improving your efficiency and facilitating remote work for trusted employees.
Professional Growth
As a leader, it’s your job to ensure your employees reach their maximum potential. However, if you’ve ever led a training course or professional development program, you’ll know that engaging busy employees in further training is easier said than done.
You can foster professional growth and encourage people to engage in further training by offering employee incentive programs to those who sign up for professional development courses. Offering enticing incentives can also improve engagement by:
- Enhancing job satisfaction;
- Improving performance tracking;
- Aiding goal-setting efforts;
- Facilitating feedback and self-evaluation.
You can improve uptake in professional growth programs by changing your policies for those who invest in further education, too. For example, if an employee signs up for funded university credits, you should adjust their monthly KPIs to ensure they aren’t overworked and can complete their course load.
If you still find people unwilling to engage in professional development, consider making it part of their work responsibilities. Sometimes, they are so focused on completing their daily tasks that they overlook opportunities that would meaningfully improve their career prospects.
By mandating professional development, you give these dedicated team members a chance to engage in college classes or skill-building sessions that they would otherwise ignore in favor of their day-to-day responsibilities.
Morale Boosting Methods
Sometimes, your team needs a quick motivational boost to raise morale and engagement. Timely morale-boosting interventions are critical during a long-term project, where employees are more likely to become burned out while trying to manage competing deadlines.
The easiest way to boost morale in the middle of a challenging project is to offer flexible scheduling, remote work, or paid time off (PTO). This can be a real boon for employees who are managing responsibilities like raising children while trying to perform well at work. By trusting your team to manage their workload, you show that you respect their work-life balance and want to help them lead a personally and professionally fulfilling life.
If flexible scheduling and remote work aren’t an option, invest in simple employee engagement tactics like paying for lunch, offering free coffee, and rewards like paid vacations or dinners paid for by your business. These small gestures aren’t a replacement for proper policies and engagement strategies but can help boost morale by recognizing the hard work of your current employees.
Conclusion
Effective leadership can boost employee engagement and help you run a more productive workplace. Focusing on fostering engagement can enhance morale in your business, reduce turnover, and aid your efforts to recruit highly talented applicants. Doing so can support your efforts to grow your business and will ensure that your workplace is well-regarded in the industry.
You can start building engagement by offering perks like fully funded professional development courses and additional PTO for those who meet or exceed their performance goals. These rewards are deeply fulfilling and prove that you authentically care about the growth and well-being of your team.
Investing in small rewards, like pizza or free coffee, can make your business a more enjoyable place to work, too. This will bring out the best in you and ensure that you become the type of leader that people want to work for.
