But, I Know How-to Engage My Team

Engaging and mobilizing employees can be a huge challenge. Over the years, we have found a few simple behaviors have had a huge impact on improving engagement of large and small teams. It’s frustrating to attempt to read minds, and most of the time, when we go there, we get it wrong anyway. How many of your employees are frustrated, because they feel they have to read their manager’s mind? What began as a cordial, happy relationship during the interview and onboarding process has now become strained 6- or 12-months later. This pattern repeats itself year-after-year-after year.

It’s called a blind spot for a reason! Employees, managers and some executives don’t know how they are doing and how they can do better. Why? Because no one says anything for a myriad of reasons, or if they do it’s a shit sandwich or some passive-aggressive message. The annual performance review in a post-pandemic environment is forever changed. With so many financial and administrative platforms today, what was once an employee’s only chance connect with their report-to is nothing more than a compliance checkbox. There’s little opportunity for genuine feedback within an environment for improvement.

“If you want behaviors to become sticky habits, then they must be simple to understand, perform and replicate.” – Scott Spector

There are many reasons why an organization’s structure promotes such disconnects. From spans of control and layers of bureaucracy to diminishing resources are contributors to an even larger problem. In some organizations, spans of control have become so large that managers have to complete performance reviews every week on countless directs and indirect employees, ‘because the system is set up this way.’

The solutions are simpler than you might think when you dig into the root cause. There are simple strategies to engage and mobilize employees, cost virtually nothing to implement, can be put into place immediately, and have a huge impact over the employee population. Here’s a for instance – one opportunity many leaders have, even in the C-suite, is to give more frequent, informal feedback about how each employee is doing. These aren’t formal meetings on an ever increasingly tight calendar. They’re simple conversations creating a climate and influence the culture for everyone to align, clarify and instill confidence in understanding the organization’s standards and manger’s expectations.

On a recent post-merger integration with a midwestern manufacturer of 400 employees, we implemented informal conversations involving 7 simple, practical and powerful questions about everyday life for this organization. The 7 simple questions ask every leader to answer and communicate with their employees. The concept is similar to influence advertising and social media – frequency counts.

On average over the initial 6-month period, the conversation durations were 42 minutes. Engagement numbers of employees highly engaged rose from 12% to 33% and actively disengaged declined from 54% to 29%. Nearly half of the employee population is seeing positive improvements to communication, behaviors and attitudes. This strategy is one example of how we rejuvenated the climate to influence their culture. Small, informal conversations about performance go a long way – especially when they include teachable moments about different situations and details. The questions include:

1. What do believe I expect from you? 
2. What are you doing well? 
3. What, if anything, can you be doing better?
4. What, if anything, do I want you to do better?
5. (If appropriate): What will happen if you improve (e.g., more responsibility, more time with leadership, more desirable assignments)? 
6. (If appropriate): What will happen if you don’t improve?
7. How can I help? (facilitate action, provide clarity, instill confidence, remove obstacles)

There are simple ways to improve engagement when you decide to do something about it. Personalize these conversations to your style to move your organization forward as a group. Perhaps you have, but ‘it’ didn’t stick or there have been changes at various levels of leadership leading to a decline in results somehow. It starts by recognizing employees leave managers, not companies, and working with managers to improve their comprehension skills is what’s needed.  Here are 3 additional messages we counsel executives and managers to encourage engagement with great success:

What becomes possible when engagement is significantly increased?

How will productivity improvements affect your top and bottom lines?

What is the value of having a pipeline of engaged leaders?

We have been bringing simple, practical, and proven strategies to US-based leaders for over two-and-a-half decades. Our methodology has been proven directly with $15M founder-led companies and inorganically grown $12B global enterprises and is ever evolving for improving employee engagement using simple and powerful strategies like these:

• Coach leaders to clearly set expectations and communicate performance on a regular, informal basis.
• Guide leaders to understand each employee’s differences and help them achieve their professional aspirations. 
• Demonstrate how-to adapt manager’s style and leadership strategy depending on each employee’s performance, talents, and unique potential.  
• Communicate with a full set of messages employees want and need to hear.
• Increase empathy and perspective as a source of support to assure employee success.