Did you know that employee engagement in the US is currently running at around 32% and that this is negatively impacting the Economy by $450-$550B per annum in lost productivity?
With such huge losses isn’t it time that you do something to improve the situation, and do it FAST.
FAST is an approach I have created where you look to ensure that you have the right Focus, Accountability, Simplicity, and Transparency, as this will help you look to get the desired results, including increased employee engagement.
Focus
When it comes to employee engagement, you need to ensure that you have the right focus. Too often we hear the claim (or corporate lie), that our people are our most important asset but rarely do you see that put into practice. It seems that order of priorities is 1 – profits, 2 – customers and then the people a distant third.
To increase engagement, and also profits and customer satisfaction, you need to truly put your people first, as this will help create a win-win-win scenario.
Accountability
At Fortune 100 company where I was consulting, the manager told me he was thinking about making some wholesale changes to his team, he wanted to bring in some engaged staff to replace those members of his team who were neither engaged, inspired or committed.
I’d like to say that this attitude is rare, but it feels like it is more like the norm.
When it comes to employee engagement, it’s not the employees who are accountable for being engaged or engagement. It’s the leader! A leaders number one job should be to create an engaged organization.
Leadership defines culture. If you want your teams to be engaged, then you need to be engaged, and you need to look to actively engage them. you cannot delegate engagement to your teams that’s not the way it works.
Just look at the research, over 50% of staff who leave a company state the number one reason they left because was because of their manager.
If you’re the leader, then you are accountable for employee engagement.
Simplicity
Now that you know that the leaders are accountable for employee engagement here are three very simple, low-cost ways to boost employee engagement, which you can start today.
This is basic leadership 101 yet it’s amazing how many leaders fail to do it. How they over-complicate engagement and make it more difficult than it should be.
Keep it simple, and show your people you care about them, their careers and give positive feedback.
Transparency
It’s easy to imagine that the majority of your staff fall into 32% of engaged employees, to fool yourselves that this is a problem that others suffer from, and doesn’t relate to you.
Now that maybe the case, but unless you measure engagement, you will never have the transparency into how you are truly performing and to know whether you need to do something to improve the situation or not.
By annually measuring engagement you can also see the impact of the steps you are taking to increase engagement, to see if they are working or not, and if not you can change approach.
It also shows to your team that you are interested in them and their engagement, which will also help to increase engagement, especially if you take it seriously.
A quick way to take a health check on your employee engagement would be to look at your staff turnover rates, if they are in line the industry average, then it’s a fair bet that your employees are engaged at the national average too.
In order to improve something you first have to measure it and that’s just as true for employee engagement.
There are significant benefits of having a highly motivated team, companies with engaged teams outperform their competitors by 202%.
So stop talking about your employees being your most important assets, show them and reap the benefits.
If you have a high rate of employee engagement, I’d be very interested to hear about how you have achieved that, what was your approach and the benefits achieved.
If you want to look to increase your employee engagement then email gordon@gordontredgold.com and lets set up a complimentary strategy session to see how we can help.
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