We hear a lot about employee engagement, leadership, and saturated with 7 Steps to What Ever Ails You.
My questions to you are:
- Are you Dead on Arrival?
- Are you showing up to work, home, and life: filled-up to serve your clients, employer, and self?
I am asking you these questions because as leaders we must show up with intention and ‘alive’ in everything we do. Modeling the behavior we expect is what we must do as well.
When I work with organizations in employee engagement we always start with a survey to see where the engagement needle is and the culture. I can say 99% of the time when engagement is low there is little trust and/or respect to and from leadership.
Here are a few steps to engaging your clients, employees, peers, leadership, and yourself:
- Discuss and outline your vision and navigate where you are going (You may feel like you are repeating yourself and that is great. It takes an average of 7 times for people to hear and understand a message and everyone on your team learns and comprehends differently such as verbal word, written, hands-on)
- Set exceptions by creating and modeling the culture your organization desires and deserves (i.e. if employees are required to clock in 5 minutes before start, leadership should model 10 minutes before start)
- Connect with clients on personal level (i.e. paraphrase what they have said, or remember your last conversation such as if they mentioned a soccer game ask them how it went)
- Connect and collaboration with peers by setting parameters of expectation, timelines, etc. . .(this always resolves who is responsible for which task, and accountability for the entire team)
- Connect with employees on 15 minute one-on-ones (be candid and transparent where you are, and they will be candid and transparent where they are on projects, hurdles, and how they plan to over come them)
- The core of engagement is transparent humility (this is not showing employees or clients how to weep but to let them know you are human, everyone wants to know they are on the team with someone who has heart)
The above list is not an all inclusive list but is a start to ask yourself where you are as a leader in engagement, and what it means to your organization. These few principles can also be applied to personal relationships when connecting to our loved ones.
Gallup updated their poll in 2013 and 70% of our employees are dis-engaged. If you could increase your engagement by 21% to your payroll what would that mean to you? Our three phase program has a track record of increasing engagement and with this improves morale, client satisfaction, and overall turnover.
Look UP & OUT ,
Tracy Worley
