Employment engagement strategies can be enormously beneficial for your business. I’ve written about this many times in the past, and there’s no need to beat a dead horse, but I’ll very briefly highlight some of the key advantages of an effective employment engagement framework:
- Improved morale and employee mental health
- Increased team loyalty and cohesion
- Enhances productivity
- More creative problem-solving
- Decreased turnover and recruitment costs
The important thing to know about employment engagement strategies, though, is that you can’t just set them in place and then forget that they exist. They require constant review, an openness toward revision, and a commitment to continuous improvement.
One way you can begin is to be candid with yourself about some of the ways in which your employment engagement strategies aren’t bearing good fruit. If your approach to employment engagement isn’t yielding the expected benefits, there could be several factors to blame, and a little troubleshooting can get you back on the right track. In today’s post, I’d like to help you in that troubleshooting process, outlining a few of the common errors that cause employment engagement strategies to go off the rails.
Where Employment Engagement Strategies Go Wrong
The wrong benchmarks or unclear goals
First things first: You’ll never be able to declare your engagement strategy a success until you define what success really means.
What exactly are you trying to achieve through your approach to employment engagement? How will you measure and track your progress? What are the metrics you’ll use to evaluate the efficacy of your efforts? And at what point will you declare your efforts to be a success?
If your strategy doesn’t seem to be producing any results, it may be because you either haven’t set the right goalposts, or you haven’t set any goalposts at all!
Lack of buy-in from the team
You can’t force employee engagement. What you can do is create a plan and set a clear agenda that people will want to buy into; in other words, you can’t coerce, but you can try to persuade employees to get with the program.
Maybe all that’s just a fancy way of saying this: You need to sell your employee engagement plan. You need to make a case for it, showing your team why it matters and why you think your efforts will get results.
If the rest of the team isn’t on board, you either need to refine your pitch or ask them directly what they’d recommend for making the plan even better. The bottom line is, if you’re the only one who believes in your employment engagement strategy, you won’t go far with it.
Inadequate feedback loop
To have a successful employment engagement strategy, you’ve got to keep the lines of communication open. And remember, that’s always a two-way street.
On the one hand, it’s important that you have a formal structure in place for providing employees with consistent and constructive feedback; the kinds of praise and criticism that can help them fine-tune their performance.
At the same time, it’s important that you be open to feedback, and have channels in place where employees can let you know how things look from their perspective.
Both sides of this equation are going to be very important to you as you develop an effective employment engagement strategy.
No connection to the corporate mission
I always like to stress the importance of being mission minded. That’s critical to all aspects of your business administration, and your employee engagement strategy is no exception.
You should always be able to articulate, clearly and concisely, what your company stands for and what it’s trying to achieve. A written statement of mission can be valuable here.
Additionally, it’s important that your team members know the mission, and understand how their role fits within it.
As you seek to build engagement, it’s critical for everyone on your team to have that shared sense of purpose, and to apprehend how their daily activities can help bring the entire team closer to their goals.
Focusing on the wrong things
A lot of employment engagement efforts go off the rails because they’re focused on all the wrong things.
You see this a lot with leaders who obsess over workplace perks and amenities. Sure, having a cool break room with trendy snack machines can be nice. But if you think that’s what employment engagement is all about, you’re really missing the forest for the trees.
Along the same lines, I’m a big believer in employment engagement surveys… but surveys are a means to an end. They can help you achieve your employment engagement goals, but surveys alone are insufficient.
Make sure you have your priorities straight as you think about improving your employee engagement efforts.
You may also like: 10 Ingredients in Effective Employment Engagement Strategies
More Tips from a Transformational Leadership Expert
I hope this brief troubleshooting guide is useful to you, and maybe points you toward some potential areas for fortifying your employment engagement strategies.
I’ll end just by stressing that engagement is a vital aspect of transformational leadership. As you seek to transform your team, you’ll want to make employee engagement one of your foremost concerns.
As an in-demand keynote speaker and transformational leadership expert, I’ve got plenty more to say on this subject. Maybe we can chat one-on-one? Reach out and let’s start a conversation about employee engagement and how it can serve your business goals. Contact me at www.rickgoodman.com or call 888-267-6098.