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Your Employee Engagement Roadmap - Part 2
Counterintuitive to Tom, and many leaders facing any one of the common pitfalls is before jumping to action or assuming there’s nothing you can do, just stop and reflect.
That’s right - the single most important step to increasing employee engagement is to stop and reflect for a moment.
Ask yourself why. Why do you think people are disengaged? What might be causing it?
Refrain from blaming the millennial generation, or whatever else it might be easy to default to. If the majority of people are disengaged at some level, then we have to look at the bigger cause. (When it’s one or two people, then we deal directly with those individuals.)
By reflecting, we’ll get to the root of it, instead of reacting poorly and causing more disengagement!
In my work over the years, I’ve heard these reasons for disengagement (in no particular order):
My manager is too busy to listen or follow through
People don’t feel connected to the vision/mission; they don’t have their own “why” or purpose.
Lack of trust in their leader and/or the organization’s leadership
They feel that they are treated condescendingly; too much negative attention on mistakes
People don’t feel like their managers care about them
Their manager is self-absorbed and not developing them
There is no team reward - only individual goals
Other team members get away with poor performance
Everyone gets treated the same, or some of us are rewarded with more work
There is a lack of meaningful communication
My manager throws people under the bus or takes credit when she shouldn’t
Can you see the common connection in these things? Yes, the person’s manager is the link to all of these. In the majority, there is a lack of effective interpersonal connection.
When asking Tom’s direct reports what they perceived, they summed it up as Tom was just not approachable. He compounded that issue by reacting with barking orders.
Many leaders are seen by their employees as being unapproachable.
Just take a look at research from Gallup which you can see in this chart:
While there could be some systemic problems, most of the time most of us are not connecting with our people enough. And no I don’t mean micromanaging and interfering. I mean connecting on an interpersonal level.
If you are connecting with your people, then they will begin to feel that you are open and approachable.
In next week’s blog post, the last part of this series on your employee engagement roadmap, we’ll share what it takes to connect with your employees and explain why that’s so important for building a truly engaged team.
We’ll dive even deeper into your employee engagement roadmap in my upcoming FREE webinar on Wednesday, June 21 at 2:00 p.m. EST.
In this LIVE webinar, Boost Employee Engagement Immediately - Without Spending a Dime, you’ll have the opportunity to learn more about how to be a truly engaging leader within your organization (and in your life!). You can also ask anonymous questions during the webinar specific to the challenges you’re facing with your employees.
Cheers!
Laurie
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