What are your 3 best practices for fostering employee engagement?

I have four tips (based on a recent blog post).

Ask: It is the employees who often know why engagement is low and will most likely have good suggestions to remedy the problems. Make sure you are constantly gathering and analyzing employee feedback and most importantly – that you are visibly acting on it. If your organization’s workforce is reluctant to share their paint points, then conduct anonymous surveys or have an outside party conduct the analysis – anything that will give you a window into any discontent. If employees see that their feedback is prompting change, then you’ve killed two birds with one stone because not only does the feedback process count toward engagement, but the suggestions and insight obtained by the process can also spark improvement.

Involve: Make sure that employees are involved in as many processes as possible that relate to their career and development. The two-way flow of communication gives employees a sense of control over their future in the organization and provides a preview of possibilities and a roadmap of how to realize them. Involvement also includes providing regular feedback. Be sure to thank them for jobs well done and express their importance in the overall business plan. Employees who are involved and rewarded are more likely to feel a sense of accountability and recognition, which have been shown to be key factors in promoting engagement.

Challenge: Employees should be given the opportunity to take risks. Employees that have the freedom to dream up innovative and fresh ideas often drive business results. In a world where conformity and having a ‘play it safe’ mentality has been rewarded, many managers might be reluctant to grant the necessary freedom to employees; however, one should note that ‘risks’ can be as simple as allowing employees to suggest and comment on ideas to improve upon the status quo. Giving employees an open-door policy for sharing ideas and innovation is a great way to foster engagement.

Place: One reason why some employees aren’t engaged at work could be that they do not have passion for their current role. It is in both the company’s and the employee’s best interest to ensure that employees are performing tasks and executing goals that are in line with their current skills and development. Clear and concise employee goals and development plans that are monitored on a regular basis and include input from the employee is a great way to ensure that employees are satisfied in their role and are engaged to produce results.

An automated Performance Management solution, such as CRG emPerform, can give you a window into the performance status of your entire talent base – allowing you to identify and address shortcomings such as low employee engagement. By automating engagement tools such as surveys, feedback processes, development plans, and goal management, increasing employee engagement can be simple and cost effective.

Here are my "3" suggestions:

1a) Ask for their recommendations, and then authorize several of them -- not because YOU think they're good ideas, but because THEY think they're good ideas (and you DON'T think they're 'dangerous' ideas).

1b) If you've already made up your mind as to the course of action you're going to take, DON'T ask for their recommendations only to ignore them or just pay lip service to them.

2) When staff pushes back on a decision you made (or are considering making) because it is, in truth, a sub-optimal decision, modify your decision based on their suggestions and/or chief concerns.

3) Recognize (and reward) people who challenge your decisions in constructive, respectful, well thought-out ways so that others see you're impressed with their courageousness, thought-leadership, and willingness to stand up and be heard and that you do not 'shoot the messenger.'

Brielle - there are 3 basic needs of every employee - 1) to be Heard, 2) to be a part of something Bigger than themselves, and 3) to be Rewarded in some way for that (usually not money). Engagement will rise if you focus on these simple, but not easy, vectors.

First - listening is critical to get the ideas and opportunities (and challenges) that are in the workforce. Surveys are easy - follow up is hard. I have seen what works best is to mix some 1-1 meetings in with Skip-level team meetings across the group. Get the senior leaders to embrace this, and really gather input from all areas. 3 Simple questions we use which are magic - 1) What should we Keep doing, 2) what should we Start doing, and 3) What should we Stop doing.

Second, you must play back what you heard - or you didn't hear them. The best way to do this, and to accomplish the second goal, is to use the data to align the current goals of the organization to pick up on these themes. In similar team meetings, have the senior leaders play out the goals of the company AFTER they show what they have heard from the group. That will help engage the team in aligning with the goals - they came from them.

Third, design some type of reward mechanism that is new, novel, and not expensive. We had a client that needed to hire people quickly, and were not getting good referrals from employees. The senior executive decided to give away a big screen TV - even going to the store and buying it THAT DAY and putting it in the lobby. We instantly had a buzz on not only the resumes, but on the fact that the exec was engaged (and so should we...). The TV was less, by half, than the referral bonus that wasn't working.

Working those elements if listening, aligning, and rewarding in some way are always in our playbook.

Brielle: It's important to note that leadership and employee engagement are directly correlated. It is not possible to have weak leadership in an organization and experience high levels of employee engagement. So building an organization with core leadership stregnth is important.

Next all must realize that either by designation or default everyone is a leader in an organization. Peers look to peers for examples on how to act and behave as well as looking to the management team. So everybody is a roll model and there are no exceptions.

Once it's understood that everyone is a leader then we can come to realize that leadership is not a skill or attribute of the roll of leader, but resides in the relationship between the leader and the led. Leadership is a shared responsibility because to have strong relationships everyone must share in the effort.

Then we need tools and tactics to create healthy relationships. Research shows employees don't leave jobs or companies, they leave people. Poor relationshps at work is what causes people to leave. When you consider the high rates of divorce and people choosing not to marry is it any surprise that our work relationships are poor too. So enhancing employees abilities to grow healthy relationships is key.

So the 3 best practices for fostering employee engagement are:
1. Build the core leadership at all levels of the organization
2. Have tactics and tools to help everyone build stronger work relationships.
3. Focus on the needs of individuals

First if the company culture and the leadership does not foster engagement it will not happen. Managers do more to stifle it than they do to encourage it. This has been my experience and observations over the last 30 years.

What practices do I use?
1.) Be open-minded and to listen. People have some great ideas.
2.) Challenge the ideas. I make then justify their ideas. This forces them to think it through and how it fits into the business or project plan. What is the ROI, savings, risks? What will be the drop dead date and what is the mitigation plan if it doesn't work? This helps them better justify their next idea and helps build your succession.
3.) Reward them and not by throwing money. I like to have them explain the idea to others. I find it great to watch the enthusiasm and excitement while they are doing it. This also inspires others to what to get engaged and contribute.
4.) Share the lead. Let others lead especially when you are out of the building. They will have a better appreciation of what you do for them.

Contact center employees have three fundamental needs. They are as follows:
1. Physical = This is about meeting employees ergonomic needs. Do they have a properly fitted chair, good lighting and noise canceling workstations? After all, they are sitting at their stations for 80%-85% of their day.
2. Mental = Are you providing adequate training and coaching to develop employee competence and confidence?
3. Emotional = Are you rewarding your employees for a job well done or just letting them know when they have done something wrong?

1. Hire for talent
2. Manage effectively
3. Compensate fairly

Research shows, and our experience validates that building trust in organizations is the number one way to increase employee engagement. Providing people with challenging work to do and appropriate rewards and recognition go a long way towards the same end.

The net of it is that if you treat people with dignity and respect, listen to them and incorporate some of their ideas into the plans and tell the truth about your business, people will out perform others in organizations that ignore these critical things.

See our white paper on Creating The Best Place To Work at:

http://www.glowan.com/news_resources/resources_best_place_to_work.php

Brielle - Great question!
From my own perspective, every organisation has its own unique drivers of engagement. Of course, there are trends that research shows. For example, based on Towers Watson's data, we typically find Leadership & Career Development to be strong drivers of engagement. However, these drivers vary - across geographies, across companies.

The way I approach this is first through quantitative analysis to generate some discussion points. You could do this by conducting employee engagement surveys, which measure engagement, and a broad range of factors which affect engagement (performance management, career growth, leadership, core values, alignment, enablement, supervisors etc.). Next, you could use regression analyses to find out which of these various workplace factors influence engagement as an outcome. Typically, you will find 3-4 factors which have a large influence.

Such analyses could be meaningfully used for discussions among HR / Leadership team to identify ways of strengthening employee engagement. Through qualitative discussions on a quantitative analysis could help you to come up with a good way to identify what works in your own unique context.