It wasn’t too long ago that a person would get a job and work that job for 30-40 years until retirement. Long-term loyalty was expected.
Today, the workplace is quite different. Not only are employers in a fight for the best talent, but that talent is also continuously looking for the best employment opportunities; there’s little concern for jumping ship for a different employer if a better opportunity looks like it exists elsewhere. If organizations want to keep their talent, they not only have to figure out ways to get their employees engaged in the tasks and overall mission, but they have to implement strategies to keep them engaged, long-term.
So what do the best companies do to sustain employee engagement?
- Get Upper Leadership Buy-In
- Communicate Company Mission
- Gather Feedback from Team Members
- Provide Connection Opportunities
- Celebrate and Encourage Independent Celebration
- Champion Growth
- Provide Autonomy
- Reduce Workplace Stress
- Provide Opportunities for Team Members to Find Meaning
(1) Get Upper Leadership Buy-In
This is a given, but needs to be mentioned. No division leader, department manager or supervisor can develop an environment that will support employee engagement without the backing of those at the helm. Just as mid-tier leaders should provide support to their employees in accomplishing the things needed to get the company where it wants to go, the key leadership must provide other leaders support and empower them to put the needed steps in place to promote employee engagement.
(2) Communicate Company Mission
Surprisingly, many leaders (even owners) of organizations don’t have a clear grasp on their company’s mission. Of those that do, many have difficulty communicating it in a clear and concise way.
How can an organization get employees excited and involved in a mission when the participants don’t know what it is? And missions that are communicated with ambiguity result in employees having different ideas of direction and energies expended that are focused on different outcomes.
A well-defined company mission enables employees to work collaboratively toward a common goal.
(3) Gather Feedback from Team Members
Hold sessions to gather feedback. A key way to promote engagement of employees is to solicit their opinions. Holding brainstorming sessions specifically designed to get feedback from employees is a great way to show employees that their thoughts are valued, it necessitates their involvement, and provides leadership with the opportunity to explore different ways of reaching goals. Suggestions generated by employees can initiate positive momentum, momentum originating from them.
A Note about feedback sessions: They should only be held if there’s genuine intent on using what comes out of them. (Not all feedback is beneficial, but the quickest way to stop an employee from providing his/her opinions is to have them believe that their contributions aren’t valued.)
Feedback sessions can also be held among leaders. These leaders who solicit feedback from their employees can then be held accountable among their peer group, and employees will recognize that their feedback is taken seriously by the organization.
(4) Provide Opportunities for Employees to Connect With Others
People are interactive creatures. We all want a sense of belonging. We find meaning in relationships with others, and the workplace is no exception.
Dr. Melanie Katzman, psychologist, business consultant and author of the Wall Street Journal’s #1 best-seller, “Connect First,” talks about the importance of human connection in her book.
She takes a look at our world today, and explains that, with the emergence of new technologies, we’re able to stay more easily connected to others than ever before. That being so, she asks why so many feel under-appreciated and actually isolated, two major factors in unhappiness at work. Her answer is that, with the adoption of these technologies, businesses have lost sight of the fact that people are relational. Businesses are run by people, and people are emotional beings in need of meaningful relationships with others. And providing opportunities for employees to nurture these meaningful relationships in pursuit of common goals can re-establish employee happiness, and business success.
Here’s the thing: Leaders want employees to be engaged at work. Employees want to believe in their direction, and have strong relationships along the way. Providing them with clear direction and opportunities to connect with others is a basic step toward both the employer and employee getting what they want– employers end up with happier, more productive employees and the employees interested and involved.
How is this done? There are quite a few ways, some task-related and some not.
Some examples of task-related connection opportunities:
- Lunch-and-learns: enable your employees to have a luncheon, specifically to talk about a task that they’re working on.
- Brainstorming sessions either on-site or off-site
- Morning or afternoon breaks with a snack
Some other examples:
- Charity events
- Company awards events
- Meet-and-greets
- Other social events
(5) Celebrate and Encourage Independent Celebration
We’ve talked about the importance of celebration in several other posts. In this step, we’re referring to the need to celebrate employees’ successes, and also promote their own expression of positive emotions.
In our post specifically on celebrating with employees, we discuss the need for employees to feel recognized for their achievements.
In a study published by researchers at Portland State University, the extent to which expression of appreciation takes place at work directly affects employees, and ultimately, the bottom line.
One of the researchers states that “including gratitude in a business plan is an essential step that many business leaders miss, and that omission can have financial consequences.” The results of this study concluded that employees who receive positive recognition for their contributions are ultimately healthier and happier. He states, “preventing headaches and other stress-related symptoms means fewer sick days, and, cuts down the cost of replacement[s] and overtime pay.” Cost of replacements? Yes, this gets to the very heart of why employee engagement is so crucial.
Promoting celebration doesn’t just mean in formalized recognition events. While employer-to-employee praise is important, organizations wanting to promote employee engagement should also foster mere opportunities across groups and levels to express gratitude.
In another study, the results of which are published in “Employee Positive Emotion and Favorable Outcomes at the Workplace”, the authors suggest that when employees are able to exhibit positive emotions at work, it has a positive effect on employees themselves, as shown by such things as diligence. It also improves how they relate to others in the workplace, as well as how they’re viewed by other employees. It all can produce a positive domino effect.
Whether in some type of recognition event or just off-the-cuff expression of positive emotion, work environments where celebration is encouraged will likely notice the positive effects through improved employee morale and involvement.
(6) Champion Growth
Companies grow as a direct result of their employees’ own growth, adaptations to changes in the marketplace, and adoption of new skills and behaviors. Simply stated, a company won’t grow if the people who run them don’t grow. On the flip side, companies that promote individual growth tend to see more employee involvement.
That said, business leaders should then obviously invest in their own growth and the growth of their employees. For leaders, this mean relinquishing some control in order to take the time to explore new ideas and skills for themselves. It also means empowering others to grow professionally in ways that will end up benefiting the organization.
Providing the right opportunities for team members to develop new skills means first discovering and understanding the interests of employees and aligning them with exciting chances to expand themselves, to be uncomfortable for a bit, and learn to adapt. (The fastest runners in the world first were toddlers, uncomfortably learning how to walk, then run, and eventually mastered it after a lot practice.)
In addition, the leader needs to…
(7) Provide Autonomy
Individual growth is hard to attain without some degree of autonomy. Each employee must have the opportunity to succeed… and fail. With failure comes some of the most impactful lessons. Learning each lesson is an occasion to adjust, to make improvements. Take it from Michael Jordan, an all-time great in basketball:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Employees who are given the freedom to explore their capabilities learn, and through that they grow, and with the growth are engaged in making themselves better, AND the company and leader win as a result.
(8) Reduce Workplace Stress
It’s arguable that a degree of stress is beneficial to performance. Some might even say that the absence of stress can breed complacency. But it’s also quite easy to argue that an excessive amount of stress is unhealthy. It’s unhealthy for individuals and also for an organization.
SSRN, an online open-source community working with academia and government institutions, published a recent article studying stress within a certain business vertical. In short, they state that stress causes or contributes to:
- A deficiency in organizational performance
- Decreased performance of employees
- An increase in employee error rate
- An increase in employee turnover
- An increase in health-related absenteeism
- A perceived imbalance in work and family life, and
- An increase in life-threatening illnesses
In light of these negative effects of stress, why WOULDN’T a good leader seek to eliminate or at least minimize stress for their employees? (AND, in many ways, this can reduce stress for the leader, too!)
One way to do this is to encourage breaks.
Short breaks:
Promoting breaks in work throughout the day may sound completely counter-intuitive: breaks are disengagement for small amounts of time during the workday. Yet, studies show that short stints of no productivity (because an employee has taken some time to relax), can ultimately lead to overall greater productivity, AND greater overall happiness.
A study published by the University of Illinois showed that the ability of employees to deeply focus on a task greatly improved with the addition of short breaks throughout the duration of the task.
Short breaks can also allow for physical movement, which gets the blood flowing – and the creative juices then have more opportunity to flow freely.
Talking to a friend, reading, or listening to something funny, opens up different neural pathways that can sometimes enable different perspectives to emerge once a person re-engages after taking a break.
Vacation:
You might think that few people need to be motivated to take a vacation, right? Interestingly, statistics show that most Americans don’t take all of their allocated vacation, and most call in or somehow stay connected with their work when they do. Take a look at this chart, which shows the comparison, by year, of the percentage of Americans who took vacation.
As you can see, the number has decreased. In 2001, 74% of employed Americans took vacation within the previous year. In 2005 the number dropped to 71%, and in 2017, 69% took vacation within the previous year.
What’s more, according to Forbes who cites research conducted by a British software company, roughly 47% of Americans surveyed in 2017 didn’t take all of their allotted vacation, and more than 21% gave up five or more vacation days by not taking them. (Forbes, 2018)
Yet, time away is important for individual health, and for the company that wants its employees to be fully-charged and engaged in their work.
An article published by Psychology Today on the importance of taking vacation states that science backs the notion that vacations increase productivity in employees. It says that “leisure is an important predictor of our well-being and satisfaction with life, including our health, work engagement, creativity, and even marital satisfaction. ”
According to this same article, not all vacation activities are created equal when it comes to revitalizing. Interestingly, encouraging active sports endeavors or spending time with friends — activities that enable an employee to recharge while getting their minds away from work and emails– is far better at promoting well-being than spending time on tv or searching the internet.
Other Ways to Reduce Stress at Work:
What are some ideas? There’s a myriad of ways, depending on creativity, budget and interest. Have you heard of sleep pods? Google has. Some companies have activity rooms including games and books. Some companies plan regular out-of-office events. Some have inter-office contests as a way of building relationships while reducing stress. Many determine stress-relievers based on ideas generated by employees through brainstorming sessions; that way, the employees themselves are actively involved in their own solution to reduce stress.
Happy employees feel that they are contributing, and they most likely are! And employees contributing to the betterment of the business is the essence of why employers work so hard for employee engagement.
(9) Provide Opportunities to Find Meaning
People want to find purpose in what they do. They want it to matter. Look no further than Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which we describe on the Foundations of Leadership post, to see that meaning is at the top of the pyramid.
Have doubts about this? Just look at author Rick Warren’s “The Purpose-Driven Life,” and the fact that by 2019, 32 million copies had sold in over 85 languages, topping multiple best-selling charts for many weeks at a time. And it’s still selling well.
People find different meaning in different things. Most continue to search. That’s why it’s important to know employees and what inspires them. Most get satisfaction out of contributing to a higher good… bettering the world in some way, but each employee is different. Some find meaning in helping their boss excel. Some find it through contributing to the companies profitability through their work. Some do the daily grind and find most meaning through what the company contributes philanthropically. Some are primarily relationship-driven.
However they do it, the leaders who are most effective at sustaining employee engagement tap into finding meaning with and for their employees.
Additional Question:
With employee engagement so crucial for the long-term health and growth of a company, we often get asked, “What’s an employee engagement strategy for my company?”
The reality is, there are concepts that can be applied, but there is no single plan that works for every organization—a cookie-cutter approach to promoting long-term employee engagement. Since business is dynamic and people are dynamic, the plan has to be based on the circumstances, and should incorporate the key steps above.
So what can YOU do to start developing your own plan today?