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Only about 35 percent of Americans feel engaged at work, according to Gallup. Engaged employees are more involved at work, and go out of their way to do tasks beyond their job description. They’re not just marking time – they’re excelling in their roles, using their talents, driving innovation, improving processes, and leading by example.
But how can you get the other 65 percent of your workforce engaged? Can your management style really make a difference to your employees’ levels of engagement? It sure can. The more positive and productive interactions you can have with your employees as a manager, the greater their engagement will be. In fact, managers are responsible for as much as 70 percent of the variance in engagement levels between teams. Here’s what great managers do to keep their teams invested in their work.
Set Clear Expectations
Who can excel when they don’t even know what their goals are? You need to set clear expectations for each employee’s performance. If employees don’t know what you expect of them, they could start to feel disillusioned, conflicted, confused, and divorced from the company’s bigger picture.
Making sure that your employees know what you expect of them is foundational to good management. Annual performance reviews don’t come often enough to be useful, and often don’t seem relevant to an employee’s daily tasks. You need to work with employees in real time to give them feedback on their performance, and help them set professional and performance goals that can help them build skills and contribute to the organization.
Don’t just hand employees a list of tasks and walk away. Employees need regular interaction with their managers, particularly on the subject of goals, responsibilities, and progress. Engaged employees are more likely than their disengaged colleagues to say that managers helped them prioritize tasks and set professional and performance goals. Help employees understand their responsibilities, guide them in setting performance goals, and then talk to them regularly about those goals and any progress that has been made. Use performance management tools like Workhuman Conversations to measure employee performance metrics and progress, and give employees access to their own performance data. You might find that you’re setting new goals with employees a lot more often than once a year.
Encourage Employees to Build on Their Strengths
Research has shown that it’s much more effective to help people improve their performance by building on their strengths than on fixating on their weaknesses. Employees who lean into their strengths and talents at work are more engaged, more productive, and less likely to seek employment elsewhere.
You can’t assume that employees know what their strengths are, and that’s why you need to make sure that your regular performance talks cover what employees are doing well in addition to areas where they need improvement. Focus on strategizing with employees to come up with ways they can use their natural talents to do their jobs more effectively. You can empower employees to find strengths they didn’t know they had and have the authority to put them in roles where those strengths will help them excel.
Develop Real Relationships with Your Team Members
The more often you engage with your employees, the more engaged they’ll be in their jobs. Employees who speak to their managers regularly are about three times more likely to be engaged at work than those without such close communication with their supervisors. Daily communication is even better – employees who have some form of communication with their managers each day are the most engaged.
That communication doesn’t have to be face-to-face – it can be via text, phone, video chat, instant messenger, or email. You need to be prepared to respond promptly to any employee attempts to contact you – answer emails, calls, and texts within 24 hours. Make a point of knowing what your employees are currently working on.
Fostering employee engagement as a manager goes deeper than that, however. You have to put in the time to get to know your employees as people and form real relationships with them. Employees are more likely to be engaged when they feel their managers value them as people. Endeavor to make your employees feel comfortable and friendly enough to experiment, innovate, collaborate, and support one another.
Great managers can do a lot to keep employee engagement high. Employees who feel valued by their managers are more likely to be more engaged at work, and that means setting clear goals, communicating frequently, getting to know your employees, and encouraging them to use their strengths. It’s worth it for the increased productivity that high employee engagement brings.
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