3 Ways to Raise Employee Engagement

If you believe in the connection between engagement, productivity and profit, then you’ll want to act on these ideas. Each one can make a difference, but do them all and you’ll be sure to have an engaged workforce.

1. Give people autonomy. This is hard for some leaders, but it’s what your people want. In the book Drive by Dan Pink, he points out that this is a key part of what drives people in the workplace. They want to do things their way and learn by doing. When you take that away from them by being too prescriptive or too involved in every aspect of the work, their engagement drops.

Now, you might stop with autonomy, thinking that just giving people the opportunity to figure work out for themselves is enough, but Pink goes on to add time to the mix. This means it’s also valuable to let people decide what to work on at any given moment and even when to work!

This leads us to another book by Dan Pink called When. In this book, Pink shares that not all people are early risers who like working during the day. Some people are night owls who get their best work done in the evening. We know that inherently, but few leaders do anything with this knowledge.

Are you flexible enough to accept that some of your people don’t want to start work at 8:30 am? This type of autonomy will also be hard for some to grant. Remember the connection to productivity and profit and it might get easier.

2. Connect work to a larger purpose. There’s a famous story of JFK walking through the NASA space center in 1962 and coming across a man sweeping the floor. Kennedy walked up to the man and asked what he was doing. The man replied that he was helping to put a man on the moon. This might come across as an extreme case of knowing your ‘why’, but it certainly makes the point. Do all of your people understand the purpose of their work? What greater vision are they contributing to? What strategic purpose does their work hold to the organization?

Help your people make this connection and their engagement will go up. Not sure how to do it? Think of the job a person does and answer
the question, “And what difference does that make?” Then again: “And what difference does that make?” Ask it until you get to the real purpose of the role that supports the mission of the organization.

If you can’t get to such a place where a clear connection exists, this role may be unnecessary.

Help each person understand their purpose and you’ll likely see engagement, productivity and retention rise.

3. Build trust. You might not think of building trust to raise engagement, but imagine having engaged employees without it. Can’t be done. In his book The Speed of Trust, Stephen M. R. Covey states that high-trust organizations reap a trust dividend in that costs go down and speed goes up.

When teams and people trust each other, they don’t need to follow up and check on work or worse micromanage the effort. Extra work increases costs and slows down productivity.

Covey shares 13 building blocks of trust in the book. They’re all essential, but the ones that stand out to us are:

Talk straight
Demonstrate respect
Right wrongs
Deliver results
Get better
Confront reality

By doing these things and more, you will find trust increasing. A byproduct of that should be increased engagement when you add on to the trust you’ve developed with other positive actions as were mentioned previously. Incidentally, all of the building blocks (called “behaviors” on Covey’s site) can be found here. We recommend getting the book and taking the self-assessment found therein. Respond to the statements in the assessment with full transparency and you’ll have a starting point from which to build trust with others by working on yourself first. Trust always begins there.

4. How about a bonus idea? Invest in training and development. When people grow in their knowledge of how to do things better, their enthusiasm grows and their positive feelings towards the organization that invested in them rises accordingly. Pink calls this mastery in Drive. Want an example? Recently Walmart decided to make AI skills training available to every employee. That decision may not make engagement rise immediately, but ultimately it probably will since people who take them up on it are going to feel more comfortable about their ability to contribute to the mastery of their role using current technology that’s available to them.

Employee engagement does not need to be elusive. You can raise it with a plan and consistent execution. We don’t offer AI skills training, but we do offer a variety of other programs that may benefit your teams. If you would like help to create a plan, measure engagement at your organization, or to support the execution of steps in your plan, contact us to have a no-obligation exploratory conversation.

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