As a leader you’re not supposed to tell your employees what to do. Instead you’re supposed to “engage” them. You’re supposed to motivate them and empower them and create a work culture that plugs them in, contributing to the health of the business. But how do you do that? What are the best engagement ideas for employees?
Employee engagement has been all the rage in organizational development circles, ever since Gallup first reported that engagement was at a record low (26% in 2000 and at an all-time high of 34% in 2018!). Since low employee engagement is correlated with all kinds of negative outcomes for business, and high engagement relates to competitive advantage especially in growth companies, managers have been told to develop and implement engagement ideas for employees. If you’re a manager, you know this is easier said than done. The vast majority of employees are unengaged for a reason, and even though you’re “the boss,” you’re statistically likely to be unengaged too.
Recently, I’ve watched two of my clients – leaders of growing organizations – turn the employee engagement problem on its head, and they’ve done it in a surprising way. They made it about themselves and their employees, both. This sounds counter-intuitive so let me explain, and show you how you, too, can make the effort to engage employees more about yourself.
Title image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Engagement Idea for Employees: #1 – Win-Win-Win
Katie is the President and CEO of a small company that is growing so fast she has the opportunity to fire clients from time to time. The good news about this growth for her employee engagement strategy is that she doesn’t have to put up with clients who can be downright abusive to her employees. The bad news is that everyone is so busy that they hardly have time to breathe, much less “engage.”
Katie really wanted to invest in her employees, knowing that she and they were in danger of burning out. The problem was that she found it hard to make time to even interact with them outside the constant crush of meetings they all attended. She came up with engagement ideas like happy hours and monthly birthday parties but noticed that some employees found these events more engaging than others, and the party animals weren’t even the employees she most wanted to feel invested in the business. She found herself becoming ambivalent about these social events as well, dreading them when she saw them on her calendar as it often added non-productive time for everyone.
This time crunch left her feeling helpless to engage everyone. That’s when I gave her a shiny new win-win-win puzzle. The challenge? Find a single win that addresses all three of the following:
- Something she wanted
- Something that her employees wanted
- Something that would support the business
The moment I asked her this question in our leader coaching session, a light bulb when off in her head and she knew the answer: personal development around time and conflict management. Boom! She immediately became excited about setting aside time to do group training around these two topics. She remembered several employees asking for tools in these areas and knew that by investing in such training, everyone would be better able to serve themselves and their clients. She personally became excited about learning strategies to help her instill new time and energy management discipline in her own life. She knew she needed to create boundaries with her staff, their clients and even her own family. She also decided to roll out a new “no meetings before 10AM policy” to support everyone’s efforts to manage their time more proactively.
The trainings have been a success and Katie notices that because everyone is taking the training together, these development sessions have begun a new discussion around the company culture. Employees are becoming proactive in supporting each other’s efforts to manage their time in new ways. The win-win-win strategy is playing out in new, positively unintended ways with clients as well. Katie is especially glad she factored herself into the win-win-win puzzle. “I forget I’m an employee too.” She said with a smile when we debriefed. “If it doesn’t help me it’s probably not going to help them, either.”
You may be the boss, but you’re an employee too! Click to Tweet
Engagement Idea for Employees: #2 – Be a Better Boss
Tom is also the CEO of a company that had begun a steep growth curve. He hired me to provide leader coaching to a key leader, reporting to him, who had received excellent ratings for years, and then last year, simply didn’t. Talking to the employee I quickly realized he didn’t understand why Tom felt so much urgency about the improvement areas on his performance. “Leadership qualities like ‘collaboration’ were never particularly important before,” he told me, confused. “Why am I being penalized for it now when I’m leading my team the same way I have for years?” This leader felt like the goal posts had been moved, and I could tell it was creating disengagement. Why should he continue to work so hard when the standards he was being measured against were changing without anyone mentioning it to him?
I brought this up to Tom. Why were these particular performance criteria so important to the employees’ review? Tom answered the question in the way I thought he would, saying that collaboration was an important way to innovate and draw out ideas that improve the quality of the team’s output. I coached the employee to create his own development objectives with this in mind, which he did. But Tom looked at his objectives and didn’t see the urgency he was looking for. Worried that putting the two of them in a room together would simply make matters worse, I met with Tom separately, trying to understand what was really bothering him.
“Have you explained these new evaluation criterion to your employee, and the expectation of accelerated company growth?” I asked once I saw the disconnect. “Have you told him that the way he collaborates was fine in the past, but that now you need him to improve these skills in order to help you manage the growth you’re projecting?” Tom admitted sheepishly that he hadn’t. He told me he was just figuring out now, in this discussion that he believed all the members of the leadership team would have to “up their game” over the next 18 months, including him. “I guess that’s not very good bossing,” he told me. “I guess I should explain the skills I want them to have in the future before I hold them accountable to developing them.”
I agreed.
With my support, Tom did his homework. He wrote out a job description and rating criteria for each of his leadership team members, as he expected them to be performing in 18 months. With this tool in hand we had a very productive discussion about where the employee was performing today and what skills were lacking. In this discussion, the employee became excited, understanding his role in helping lead the company’s growth in a new light. Instead of resisting the idea of collaborating more effectively with team members, he leaned into the challenge and began problem-solving ways the whole leadership team could become more collaborative.
In this discussion I watched Tom admit to some lackluster bossing, and I also watched a key leader in his company shift from teetering on the edge of disengagement to going all-in and offering to lead leaders into higher levels of performance.
Employees engage with people, not abstractions. If you’re their boss, are YOU engaging with THEM? Click to Tweet
Here’s what I learned about engagement ideas for employees in these two organizational coaching situations: it’s human nature to want to make disengagement about them, and sometimes it IS about them; but sometimes it’s not. Employees have lives and preferences and objectives that it’s not your problem to help them address. Why? Because you’re the boss and that means it’s your job to see that the business succeeds. But sometimes it is up to the boss to take on the engagement challenge very directly. There are potential win-win-wins in every employee engagement problem if you just stop and look for them. And when you don’t, then employee disengagement is on you.
