Is your organization on a mission to improve employee
engagement? If it is, this is probably for a very good reason:
organizations with engaged employees significantly outperform those without
engaged employees. In our last blog, Does Your Company Need a Health
Check Up, we asked you to look at the indicators you use to measure the level
of engagement at your organization. If like so many organizations, your
key way for measuring engagement is your annual engagement survey, you are
relying on past data. That’s what is known as a lagging indicator.
The problem with lagging indicators is that they alert you to a problem
after the fact, when it is challenging or maybe impossible to do something
about it. If your goal is to improve engagement, you can’t influence the
future using old data. But don’t get alarmed – we are not suggesting
getting rid of your survey. Instead, we recommend broadening the ways you
keep tabs on the engagement in your organizations by using also leading
indicators – ones that are future oriented and you can influence.
In our last blog we suggested several leading indicators you
can consider. Here we want to take a closer look at just one leading
indicator – the quality of relationships between your managers and their
employees. In the article The No. 1 Quality That Makes a Manager
Great Gallup emphasizes the importance of managers
connecting with their employees. If you want to proactively grow engagement in
your organization, improving the quality of manager-employee relationships is a
good place to start. Why? Through their daily interactions with
their teams, managers affect the engagement of their employees in numerous ways
– through the way they communicate with employees, develop them, conduct
meetings, how transparent they are, and various other actions. It’s the
daily words, actions or gestures from the managers that form an impression in
the mind and heart of the employee and greatly influence how the employee
behaves and performs. The good news, of course, is that this is all in
the manager’s hands. If you want stronger engagement, help managers
cultivate effective relationships with their employees.
How can managers affect engagement through small, daily
interactions? Here is a simple example. If you are a manager and
Linda, your employee, has just gone through a challenging project, when you are
debriefing the project you might ask some questions along the following lines:
What about this project did you find most stimulating?
Is there anything we can do to make sure that those elements that meant the
most to you will also be there on the next project?
You can sense the power of such questions. They get
Linda thinking about what she loves doing, and forge a stronger cooperation
between you and her in pursuit of work tasks that she cherishes. If your
interest in helping Linda do more enjoyable work is not short-lived and results
in some tangible and beneficial changes on the next project, she will show her
appreciation though greater commitment – over time, she will become more
engaged!
Clearly, this is one of many examples. Every day, almost
every interaction with employees can be rich with opportunities for the manager
to connect with employees. How can managers have impactful
interactions with employees? By being intentional – by intending to make the interaction meaningful, even
it’s an exchange that lasts a minute. Are your managers capturing
moments such as the one described in the simple example of the manager
connecting with Linda’s aspirations? All this takes is a shift in
perspective – from: “My job is to drive performance,” to: “By interacting
meaningfully I help employees grow and this impacts their performance.”
You may be thinking, “This is easy to say, hard to do.”
And you are right. But if you are seriously looking to improve
engagement, help your managers not miss the daily opportunities that are all
around them! Want to learn more about this? Look for the
forthcoming book due out this spring, It’s the Manager, which focuses on Gallup’s work in this area of helping
managers become more effective. Enjoy the upcoming article!
If you need strategic solutions to increase engagement in
your organization let us know. We specialize in helping managers to build
employee engagement and improve performance.
We look forward to hearing from you.
There is certainly a great deal to learn about this subject. I love all the points you made. Nedi Heriberto Thistle
A round of applause for your article post. Really looking forward to read more. Awesome. Amie Jerri Burns