Do You Know How to Engage Your People? 3 Tips and Why They'll Work
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By: Patrick Sandys
When you hear the word “engagement.” What comes to mind?
For most, a ring and a proposal. However, for those of us interested in leadership, engagement is a unique aspiration. Engagement is the measure of employees’ mental and emotional connection to their place of work. In other words, engagement is “the level of an employee’s psychological investment in their organization.”
If that definition is a bit academic, think about the best job you have ever had. What made the job so great? You’ll probably say that it was some combination of the people, work, and leadership. When I had great jobs, I was excited to go to work, be a part of the team, regardless of the workload and time commitment; I was engaged.
Intuitively, leaders understand that an organization cannot succeed and meet its full potential without maximizing “buy-in” from their employees. But it’s not enough to simply increase engagement if you don’t understand why your team is responding to it. By only focusing on how to increase engagement, the benefits of engagement on employees—the “so what”—becomes overlooked.
I offer three ways to increase employee engagement and explain why it will matter to the employees.
Is the Boss Hearing Me?
People want to be heard. Whether it is the political issue de jour or an opinion on weather, look no further than the proliferation of social media and the myriad of statements posted every day about any particular topic. It is human nature to have something to say and to exercise the means to say it. Your employees are no different.
To receive employees’ feedback and opinions, you first need to create a “psychologically safe” environment where employees feel they have a meaningful and “safe” way to voice their opinions (without fear of reprisal). In this environment, leaders are receptive, non-confrontational, and responsive.
Once leaders set the “psychologically safe” environment, the next step is to ensure that employees feel heard, accepted, and valued. This means a leader must always follow up on the feedback they received. When leaders follow up and acknowledge employees’ feedback and opinions, employees feel empowered, it affirms the workplace’s “psychological safety,” and a higher sense of “procedural justice ” will infuse within the organization.
Leaders don’t have to implement every “good idea,” but they must respond. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that soliciting feedback, meaningfully acknowledging the information received, and then providing an explanation for why the ultimate decision was made increases engagement among employees regardless of whether the final decision implemented the suggestion.
Though, like most leadership skills, leaders must learn to provide the environment for their employees to meaningfully voice their opinions, without getting inundated or overwhelmed, and be thoughtful in knowing how and when to respond.
And the Credit Goes To…
As a leader, how do you give credit where it’s due?
Admittedly, it is not easy. On one hand, if you set the bar too low, you risk inflating the number of awards or praise you provide, and over time, those recognitions become meaningless. Alternatively, withholding praise could lead to disgruntled employees, who feel underappreciated. There is the additional concern of ensuring you are recognizing the right people, which can be difficult if your employees work in teams.
To find the best balance, I recommend taking a page from the military. The Army has a tiered approach to awards and recognition. By creating these differing strata of awards and recognition, the Army has a meaningful way of ensuring individuals are properly recognized for services rendered or achievements accomplished. To reinforce the meaning and prestige of each award, the Army has developed standards by which each award is to be given, creating a relative value for each award and limiting the authority of who can authorize the giving of the award. Although the Army is not perfect in its practice and implementation of giving awards and recognition, the concept is one to be emulated.
A similarly important consideration is finding a method of identifying who should be recognized. There are times when wrong people are recognized for someone else’s hard work. Sometimes it is a “middle manager,” whose team did the lion share of the work and the manager swooped in and took the credit or possibly some level of nepotism is at play. I also know that the perception that gender and racial differences are often identified (rightly or wrongly) as being a determining factor. If any of these concerns arise within a leader’s team, the results can be catastrophic to motivation and engagement.
To defeat these perceptions before they can germinate, leaders must engage with employees to learn who is really putting in the work. Leaders must create an environment of trust and honesty within the organization, such that they are able to keep the pulse of the organization and understand each team member’s contribution to the organization and its mission.
Lastly, do not make recognition about metrics alone. The people who enable the team to thrive are just as important as the individuals who become the face of the final product. The importance of recognizing the right people and sharing their successes with the greater organization illustrates your commitment to them as their leader. It shows that you care and it shows that you are paying attention. Giving awards or simply recognizing the achievements of those whom you lead is the easiest and least utilized means of building engagement. Leaders must be creative in how they recognize their teammates and utilize the tools available to them. Failing to do so will inevitably lead to disengagement, a drop in morale, and a general frustration that can have significant detrimental effects on the organization.
Would you want to work for you?
How do your employees see you? Try closing your eyes and imagine you’re having an out of body experience. Observe your body language and interactions with people, starting the moment you walk into the office. Now ask, would you want to work for you?
Though hackneyed, the idea of “leading by example” is one that should be internalized, analyzed, and adjusted in real time by every leader. For many, leading by example means that you are putting in the extra time and energy every day, staying late, arriving early, and sacrificing your time for others. Without a doubt, there is a time and a place for this type of example setting, but such an approach is a recipe for burnout, and very often detrimental to the organization. Instead, I would argue that a leader’s focus needs to be on setting an example that emphasizes what is most important for the organization and motivates employees to accomplish those goals. Often, one's body language and interactions with employees must be geared towards employee engagement, rather than simply focusing on the bottom line. Ultimately, the work will get done, and it will get done faster and with higher quality, if employees are motivated and engaged.
So how does one become an example that motivates people to work harder, smarter, and with a positive attitude?
You must model the engagement you wish to see and it starts with how you are seen by those around you. Sixty percent of effective communication is one’s body language and appearance. How you present yourself and the way your team sees you approach the work, goes a long way to engage or disengage your people.
If you are a person whose hair is constantly on fire, or has a short temper, you need to recognize that and take measures to control it (one method is to seek feedback, as advocated in the first section above). Alternatively, if you are aloof, or generally disengaged with both your work and your people, that is equally troublesome. Leaders must constantly assess the effect and perceptions of their presence in the office, especially if they want to keep their people engaged.
The goal is always to be, or at a minimum, appear to be, the leader for whom you want to work for. If you can’t embody that, then how can you expect your people to want to work for you, and thus, be engaged in your organization? Aristotle may have put it best, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Employee engagement is a priority in leadership practice. To ensure success, leaders need to build feedback loops that allow them to assess and understand what drives their employees and what steps are needed to remedy shortfalls. Have a solid understanding of what is important to your people (and why), and all metrics from happiness to productivity will follow.
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Patrick Sandys is a compassionate leader, educator, attorney, and mentor. Pat’s primary legal focus has been military justice, having spent years as a prosecutor, defense attorney, and special victim’s counsel. He is now the Command Judge Advocate for the 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hick, Hawaii. Before moving to Hawaii, Pat spent a year developing and teaching leadership as the Deputy Director of the Leadership Center at The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Charlottesville, VA.
Pat is a graduate of Brown University and the University of San Francisco School of Law. A student of American History, when Pat is not reading the memoirs of President Ulysses S. Grant or the fight for Women’s Suffrage, he is finding his way to the ocean with his two beautiful children and his wife, Pearl.