Your business’ bottom line isn’t the only indicator of success. While it’s certainly important, if that is the only metric you’re using to quantify success, you’re likely not seeing the whole picture. To get a more accurate gauge of the success, health, and strength of your organization you must examine employee engagement.
According to Gallup, employee engagement nationwide is sitting around 32%. That means it’s quite likely that only 1/3 of your employees are engaged. And here’s the kicker – disengaged employees cost their employer, on average, 34% of their salary (source). This equates to roughly $450-550 billion (yes, with a “b”!) across the United States annually.
In other words, without employee engagement, you’re at a huge financial disadvantage. An unengaged employee is less productive during their workday, more likely to no show for work, and far more likely to leave your organization. Not only that, but disengagement is contagious. One disengaged employee can easily turn into two, and the next thing you know you have teams and departments that are unsatisfied, underperforming, and unmotivated. Talk about expensive. For the sake of your organization and your people, you have to make employee engagement a priority.
So What is Employee Engagement?
Simply put, employee engagement is the level of commitment an individual feels toward their employer. The more engaged an employee is, the more enthusiastic they are about their role, their responsibilities, and the overall outcome of the company as a whole.
When you implement tried and true strategies, you can increase engagement in your employees. And when they’re engaged, good things happen. Let’s take a closer look.
What Happens When Employees Are Engaged?
The statistics on employee engagement are pretty clear. It is arguably one of the most important things to consider in the management and leadership of your organization as data shows that employee engagement equals organization success. Here are a few things that increase when employees are actively engaged.
- Morale. When an employee is engaged, their overall sense of morale rises, which (depending on the individual) can have an infectious quality and raise the morale of others.
- Productivity. When an employee feels like their contributions matter, they put more effort into their work and turn out more or even better-quality work.
- Self-worth. If an employee sees the work they’re doing as having value and being appreciated, their feelings of self-worth rise. They get chemical reinforcement in the form of dopamine from their brains! In fact, compliments or effective recognition in the workplace have proven to be as effective as cash in terms of employee engagement.
- Connectedness and retention. A big part of feeling engaged means that the employee feels connected to their job and/or their employer. This means they’re more likely to stay with that employer. Employee retention can be a huge cost savings for companies and can bolster confidence in other employees and even customers.
- Loyalty. When your team is engaged, they feel loyal to the company – but it goes further than that. The loyalty that employees feel translates to consumers, customers, and your overall perception as a company and brand is solidified.
- Profits. As a direct result of having a more loyal fan base and more productive and innovative workforce, your company’s profits will rise.
It’s pretty clear that companies that have employees who are committed and aligned to the organization’s mission, vision, and values drive the business forward. The higher the engagement, the better employee retention and performance. When your people are performing to the best of their ability, they’re wowing your customers, driving up customer loyalty. This organizational success creates an environment where innovative, out-of-the-box thinking is far more encouraged and supported by leadership, bringing engagement and performance up even more. It’s a full cycle.
How to Drive Employee Engagement
We know that employee engagement can solidify an organization’s success and disengaged employees can tank a company. So how do you boost engagement?
First, you have to establish a baseline of how engaged your employees actually are. You won’t know how to solve the problem, or even if there is a problem, without gathering data on engagement. This is one of the reasons why we developed our Manage 4 Performance™ software – because it allows us to easily quantify the engagement of every department, team, and individual in our organization.
Once you have the numbers, you have to do something with them. That’s where management and leadership come in. Truly effective managers operate more like coaches. They know the ins and outs of every individual on their team – their strengths, weaknesses, motivators, and behavioral tendencies. Not only do they know this about their people, but they use it to customize their coaching to them. Going from a one-size-fits-all management approach to coaching your employees as unique individuals will automatically increase engagement as your employees will feel known and understood.
From there, you can implement some of the pillars of our Manage 4 Performance™ approach – empowering employees to own their growth and development, consistent one-on-one communication between managers and employees, and celebrating the wins of your people.
Creating an engaged environment begins with a management platform and approach that’s designed to foster performance. When you’re managing for performance, you cultivate an environment of engagement and success. Learn more about how our software can revolutionize engagement (and thereby, performance) in your organization by scheduling a demo today!
2020 rocked the boat in a lot of ways, especially in the way businesses operate. Companies that hadn’t dreamt of going remote were suddenly forced to (and were oftentimes rather unprepared). What used to be a rare perk for some became the norm for most and leadership had to adjust quickly, all the while ensuring that their employees were still driving the business forward.
Flash forward to our current day and many businesses are still operating either fully remotely or in some sort of hybrid capacity. However, most management approaches haven’t caught up. We’re finding more and more that businesses are operating out of the same old framework, utilizing the same old practices from our pre-covid world, when that just isn’t going to drive the business results you really want.
After nearly a decade operating as a fully remote organization, we’ve learned what it takes to have record-breaking performance all while operating outside of the typical 9-5 office environment. Not only that, we’ve landed on Inc5000’s list of fastest growing companies for 3 years in a row – and we want to help other organizations do the same.
The Problem: A Lack of Visibility
Management can feel reluctant to embrace remote work for many reasons, but one of the main gripes we hear is that they can’t simply pop over to someone’s cubicle to check in on their progress. But in all fairness, if you’re relying on that brief touchpoint with employees to be your complete gauge of their performance, you likely have a very inaccurate representation of how they’re actually doing.
This perceived problem of “lack of visibility” that comes with remote work is one of the things we have learned to embrace. Instead of relying on haphazard, random communication with our employees, we developed a management approach that gives the visibility needed to take employees’ performance and engagement to the next level.
The Solution: The Manage 4 Performance Way
High performing teams won’t happen by accident, especially when your employees are empowered to work from wherever they choose. That is why we developed our Manage 4 Performance™ approach – to eliminate the confusion around what performance is and make it easy to coach your employees to be top performers. While these 10 simple strategies can (and should) be implemented for in-person workforces, they’re especially critical when your team isn’t meeting face-to-face.
- Know the goal. You cannot expect your people to hit a target they cannot see. If you are not in an office where you can quickly check in on what your people are working on, it’s imperative that both managers and employees know what “success” looks like. We suggest not only naming the goal, but keeping it somewhere for all to see.
- Consistent meetings. We’re not suggesting filling your calendar with meetings just for the sake of it, but having consistent touch points with your employees helps ensure everyone is on the same page. Our preference is for weekly meetings between managers and employees, but find a rhythm that works for your people!
- Conversational, not confrontational. Just because you’re not in person does not mean you have to micromanage your people to ensure they’re accomplishing what you need them to. Typically this serves to only harm your relationship with employees, not help. Aim to keep your meetings conversational and employee-driven vs manager-driven.
- Be supportive. A manager’s job isn’t just to make sure tasks are completed, they’re there to help if something comes up or progress isn’t going as expected. Build trust with your employees by assuming best intent and supporting their career growth and development.
- Be flexible. Meetings don’t have to be hour-long zoom calls. The consistency of a meeting is important, but some days that time is better spent getting work done and an instant message or an email can do the trick. On the flip side, sometimes you need a whole half day to work together as a team to knock a project out. Be flexible to the schedule changing, while still holding to a regular routine as much as possible.
- Demonstrate care. It’s much harder to build the personal connection with employees when you’re not having the daily “water cooler” conversations. We utilize the FORD method to deepen relationships and get to know our teammates.
- Know your team. Some people like to take the lead and work in a silo, others prefer to get everyone’s input before finalizing a task. Understanding your employees’ unique drives, motivations, and preferences and managing them accordingly is a huge step toward remote management success.
- Access to tools. What does your employee need to succeed? Giving your team all of the tools they need to do their job and to do it well is critical, yet this is a common complaint from employees who are working remotely. Investing in the necessary tools (including computer communication platforms) will reduce the problems in the future and boost employee performance. Better yet – give your employees a space where they can discuss on comment with what tools they feel they need or would love to have to be even more successful.
- Even more communication. One of the downfalls of working remotely means it’s harder to ask questions. That can leave the individual hanging and waiting for a response. The only real way to combat this is to be extremely thorough at the outset when explaining a project or a work expectation and to be as available as possible when questions arise.
- Celebrate successes. When a milestone is hit in an office there usually is some celebration – whether it’s an announcement, thank you, or even a lunch party. When no one works in the same office, the temptation is to skip it – avoid this temptation! Employees appreciate recognition, especially when they’ve worked hard. Celebrations will need to be modified, but they are still key in teambuilding and employee appreciation.
A Note on Hybrid Situations
If you’re working in a hybrid situation – some in-person work, some remote work – the tendency for managers can be to primarily focus on employees when they’re in the office. While it may be the seemingly “easy” approach, it’s a management trap for a couple of reasons. Here’s why.
First, if you’re only communicating when they’re in person, it leaves employees out on a limb when they’re remote. This is arguably the time when they need the most support. Second, it can make the office feel like a “meeting zone”. Employees may grow to resent coming in to work because they won’t get much accomplished if their calendar is swamped with meetings.
If you operate in a hybrid work situation, it’s best to treat this as remote work with an added bonus of some face-to-face time! If you allow the employee to decide if they’re coming in to connect, then those connections are more meaningful. If they’re simply coming in to accomplish work in office, then they’ll appreciate having the ability to be productive in the office.
Of course, there can be times when management encourages everyone to come in and connect or discuss big updates. By giving the employees this information beforehand, they can plan better for their day and their workload.
The Manage 4 Performance™ Difference
While we’ve been talking primarily about management approaches and philosophies, we also believe in the importance of a management platform to equip managers to be as effective as possible. Our Manage 4 Performance™ software provides visibility on performance, giving managers and employees the ability to track progress toward their goals. The best part is it completely removes the guesswork of management – and when working remotely, that’s critical. Both managers and employees can hone in on what performance looks like and know what it takes to get there.
Want to learn more about our Manage 4 Performance™ software? Click the button below to start a conversation.