In his employee engagement video series, Jeff Havens discusses six essential motivators to help foster engaged employees in your workplace. Without further adieu, here they are!
The Job Itself
Unsurprisingly, the tasks that employees are asked to perform day-to-day is one of the biggest factors in employee engagement. People need to believe that their job is important, and it’s up to you to help them understand that impact.
One way to help your employees understand that their job makes a difference is to help them see how their role helps the company in non-financial ways. Remind your employees what your company vision is, and how their job helps fulfill that vision.
For instance, if you sell medical equipment, a great leader will remind their employees how many lives are being saved by their work.
Relationships with Co-Workers
It can be challenging for effective managers to help manage relationships in their workplace, but having a cohesive department creates high productivity, and of course, high engagement.
Managing relationships doesn’t only include solving problems as they arise. Rather, a skilled manager is aware of the challenges going on around them, and can sense when there may be trouble on the horizon.
An engaged employee will trust that they will be listened to when conflict appears, and that leadership will help solve any issues. Striving to stop conflicts before they begin is a great step to achieving the engaged workplace you’ve been looking for.
Opportunities to Use Skills and Abilities
People like to do things they enjoy and expect to find success with. However, managers can have a difficult time understanding what their employees’ skills and abilities truly are.
Asking employees what their strengths are and how they would like to use those skills helps open the door to bigger ideas reaching your desk, and gives employees a chance to develop their biggest strengths, which may be underutilized.
Relationships with Immediate Supervisor
Engaged employees need to like their leaders, or, at the very least, not hate them. It’s also important that employees respect their leaders’ vision, so the first step there is to be visible.
If your employees never see or talk to their leaders, it will be hard to develop a relationship with them. Demonstrate interest in your employees’ personal and work life. This is an excellent way to show your employees that you care about them, and that you have their best interest at heart.
Contribution of Their Work to the Organization’s Overall Goal
Employees need to believe in a company’s mission and how they contribute to its fulfillment. As long as employees know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and why it makes a difference, they’re far more likely to be engaged with their work.
Autonomy and Independence
Micromanagement is the opposite of offering autonomy and independence.
As Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States once said, “The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and the self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”
Mr. Roosevelt trusted people to do their work without interference, and that kind of leadership is just one of the many reasons his image is memorialized on the side of Mount Rushmore.
