The 5 Leadership Behaviors You Need to Boost Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is everything. If your employees are dedicated and willing to go the distance with you, you’re in a good place. Research shows that engaged employees take less sick days, are more productive, have lower turnover, are better innovators and make the company overall more profitable.
Besides, more engaged employees are just far more fun to work with. It’s just so much nicer to come into work and have everybody want to be there and want to make the business better. If people have the right attitude work can be transformed to from a chore into an almost guilty pleasure.
The big question, of course, is how do you do that? I mean, we all know that we want to be engaged at work, but how can we make it more likely to occur? Here are some leadership behaviors that you can try that might turn your atmosphere from uninterested to eager.
It’s not just a job anymore
Employees now need more than that. They need a vision. For that reason it is vital that your company has an overarching vision and that each employee understands how they fit into it. That means that you have a clearly formulated vision that fits with what the employees want to accomplish, be it create a fantastic product, making the world a better place, caring for the environment or being at the cutting edge.
What’s more, employees need to know how they themselves fit into that vision. In order to achieve that, you need to not only communicate the vision clearly, but also set individual goals that demonstrate how they fit contribute and how their work is achieving the company’s goals. Only then will your employees feel like they’re part of, and are working towards, something bigger.
Empower employees
Two things that will kill engagement for certain every time are micromanagement and red tape. It’s vital for you as an employer to delegate and then let your employees own their work and make their own decisions. You have to trust them to know their jobs. This will give them a sense of empowerment and the feeling that their opinions and skills are being respected.
And yes, this does mean that employees will occasionally cock it I up, especially when you just start out empowering them and they’re getting used to the new state of affairs. And that is frustrating, but in the meantime employees will be engaged, learning and growing, as they try to shoulder their responsibilities. And that will ultimately outweigh the occasional mistake.
Have a safety net (that feels safe)
On the flip side of the empowerment coin, you need to have a system in place where if things are going wrong, employees can step to you or other people and get help without being judged for asking for it. Only in this way can you create the situation whereby they will actually approach you if there is a serious problem. Approachability is one of the must-have skills for every leader to have.
As the author of the groundbreaking book Flow, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, explains engagement lies in a narrow band between boredom and anxiety. If the task is too easy we’re bored, if it’s too difficult, we become anxious. It’s in between that we experience the greatest happiness we can experience at our work, which is Flow. Empowering your employees and letting them solve their own problems reduces boredom. Being there to help them when things go wrong, without judging, is what reduces their anxiety. And from there they can learn, grow and become truly engaged with what they’re doing.
Demonstrate cultural values and personal engagement
In order to make that safety net feel safe, make certain that nobody in the department believes the rules and the corporate culture do not apply to them, including you and the rest of management. If there are cultural events, or workshops, or other activities in which you can demonstrate a sense of community, then it is vital that you take part to demonstrate that you care about the company and the spirit that reigns there.
This will show you do not consider yourself as their better and, what’s more, will serve to make you more human and approachable. And that will mean they will also be more likely to come to you when there is a problem they can’t deal with alone. In other words, leave them alone to deal with their job as they see fit, but be around and available so that if they feel they need help to confront the problem you are there to help them.
Show them what their work means
And finally, you cannot be engaged as an employee if you do not feel your work means anything and all you do feels like you’re just spinning your wheels in the air. For that reason it is vital that employees get a sense of what they are doing and what it means. This means that you’ve got to show them the impact of their contributions, something that can be achieved through you telling them or by showing them.
This sounds straight forward enough, but it often slips by the wayside when the pressure mounts and managers have a lot of things competing for their attention. It shouldn’t. Employees need to feel that what they’re doing means something and that it is being recognized.
If they do not, then the only measurement of success they have is the paycheck at the end of the month. And that’s not a good way to measure your contribution, as extrinsic motivation reduces engagement. The goal is to have people do their work because they love it, while the paycheck is icing on the cake.
Yes, that might not be easy, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be aimed for, because the value of an engaged work force is worth almost any cost. For not only are they more productive, more innovative and less likely to take sick days, they are also more likely to roll up their sleeves and do what’s necessary when the going gets tough, like working overtime and weekends.
And that can be the difference between a company that goes under or one that stays afloat. Which would you rather have?
