The Power of Employee Engagement - Part 2

In the last article on employee engagement, we talked about what engagement is, the relationship between employee engagement, high performance, and company growth, and the cost of low employee engagement levels. In this article, I want to focus on what a manager can and needs to do to raise levels of engagement. But first, let's build a little on the definition of Employee Engagement ... We stated in the last article that employee engagement is "the extent to which employees put discretionary effort into their work, in the form of extra time, energy and brainpower". A good definition to be sure but there's more to it than that. Employee engagement can be broken down into two areas - the first being emotional and the second, rational. Within these we can define 9 core statements that characterize engagement. Read the full article here

The 9 Core Statements of Engaged Employees Managers Make The Difference Four Fundamental Actions Leading to Positive Results

The Value of Reflection

Anaïs Nin, in a more lucid moment wrote: “We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.” As we go through each day, our experiences and observations change us. So what we didn’t see yesterday we may see today, but only if we are consciously going over the old material in our heads and are challenging what we think about ourselves on a daily basis. Unless we make a conscious effort to break this cycle, we will continue to reproduce yesterday’s thinking. It is a self reinforcing cycle that gets us nowhere. Left alone, this mental inertia will cause us to miss the benefit of our experiences, our observations, and self study. We will instead, quite often find ourselves applying the same old excuses over and over again. Our growth depends on the questions we ask about ourselves, not the answers we habitually get.

Reward Your Boss

In the best seller book One Minute Manager, we were told that a manager should try to “catch someone doing something right,” and then give that someone a “one minute praise.” Roger A. Golde, on the other hand, tells us that bosses are not the only people who can give praise to others. Everybody can give praise to his or her boss, too. In “Muddling Through, The Art of Properly Un-businesslike Management,” Golde advises you to “take care of your boss! The next one may be worse.” He says, “If we expect our bosses to be the mythical managers portrayed in bossolgy, we doom ourselves (and quite possibly our bosses) to constant disappointment and frustration. We must expect the boss to have important shortcomings for which in large measure we (as direct reports) will have to compensate.” “So, on those rare occasions when the boss in fact does something right,” Golde advises, “we ought to feel pleased or even grateful instead of the “It’s about time,” attitude. Every now and then, we might even startle the boss by offering a word of encouragement or thanks.

Longing for the Sea

Longing for the Sea: Employee Involvement "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the sea." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery Sometimes managers complain that the people working with them, or those of other departments, are not involved enough in the business and do not show enthusiasm about their work. These managers often say that some employees "just don't care." Successful leadership is one that enables people to exercise and enjoy greater freedom at work. The more freedom to decide how to do one's work to achieve the defined objectives the more involved and energetic the employee is.