Engagement "How To" at Organizational, Managerial, and Employee Levels

It is imperative, in a still-challenging economy, that organizations operate lean and maximize workplace productivity.  Managers and employees must continue to "do more with less."  In order to prevail in this climate, encouraging a culture of engagement throughout the organization is critical.

Consider your current levels of engagement from an organizational perspective. How committed are your employees to their job, boss, and company?  What can you do to ensure that you hire and keep the talent necessary to be successful, and that they remain engaged and productive?

Engaged employees who are excited and enthusiastic about their jobs:

• resist distractions and exceed their targets
• find ways to improve circumstances and volunteer for difficult assignments
• encourage others to perform better, are proud of their organizations, and are most likely to stay with the company

Companies that understand and maximize their engagement levels have higher retention rates, superior customer service, and healthier bottom lines.  Successful leaders strive to create an environment that yields a highly engaged workforce across organizational, managerial, and employee levels.

Organizational Engagement

An organization is a direct reflection of its leadership. Improving engagement across the organization is both strategic and tactical.  Identify opportunities, simplify solutions, take action and hold people accountable.

Your company's culture reflects its core values, ethics, and rules that guide behavior.  Examine your vision, values, and strategy to ensure alignment between your current reality and desired destination.  Communicating a clear vision of the future is crucial.

Commit to developing your people.  Results are achieved by employees working individually, in teams, and across functions.  Talent will be your competitive advantage for the future.  Are your employees appreciating or depreciating in value?

Most employees want to develop skills for future jobs.  Place your employees in the right jobs by using predictive performance or job matching technology.

Managerial Engagement 

Senior leaders, managers, and supervisors drive engagement. Successful companies have the right people in the right leadership positions and invest in their development.

By assessing each of your leaders and identifying top- and lesser-performing employees, a proven predictive performance pattern can be developed, which facilitates identifying the best person for a position.  Determine whether your leaders are in the right jobs by comparing their results to the appropriate predictive benchmarks.

To increase leadership effectiveness, identify the leadership skills that are most commonly used when engaging employees.  Seek feedback from the leader's peers and direct reports.  Align a leader's behaviors and skills to the expectations of the organization and his boss.  Then close leadership gaps through on-the-job performance, feedback, and coaching.

Equip your managers with data regarding their employees' basic behavioral tendencies concerning productivity, quality work, initiative, teamwork and problem-solving.  Provide your managers with information to understand how to deal with their employees and their tolerance levels for stress, frustration, and conflict.

Help your managers learn to motivate.  Is an employee's source of motivation internal or external?  Use assessments to evaluate existing employees and obtain information that will significantly increase managerial effectiveness.  When employees see their manager working to learn more about them, satisfaction with the manager and engagement will increase.

Employee Engagement

With talent shortages still looming, an economy that has forced Baby Boomers to delay retirement and companies challenged to remain productive with fewer workers, organizations must rethink talent strategies to attract, engage, and retain workers of all ages and be flexible to adapt to market changes.

While there is no "right" way to increase engagement, satisfaction with employment can be directly linked to job fit.  Placing your employees in positions where they can thrive and grow, will result in greater productivity.

Successful companies identify and segment their target customers and use those same techniques to identify target employees.  Target employees have a good job fit, are fully engaged,  perform above expectations, and elevate the performance of others.

Identify potential by assessing all of your employees in the same way that you assess your leaders.  Appropriate assessments will highlight not only employees' cognitive skills, job-related behaviors, and occupational interests, but will also identify potential incumbent and future talent.

Challenging your employees - providing them with stretch goals, avoiding micro-managing, and letting them learn from their mistakes - will increase engagement.  Engaged employees need to be continuously stimulated; each new experience for them is an opportunity for growth.

Training also improves employees' value. Employee engagement increases when employees receive regular training, especially training focused on "soft" rather than technical skills.  Ironically, when you provide employees with more qualifications for their résumés, they are more inclined to stay with your company.

When challenging, training, and coaching employees, allow time to get their feedback, which can be extremely important in implementing solutions.

Research has shown that success on the job has little to do with experience, age, race, gender or education, and everything to do with job fit.  Ensure that all your employees have a good solid job fit.  Levels of engagement are directly related to employee job fit, which contributes most to your employees' - and your organization's - success.

According to the article "Job Sculpting: The Art of Retaining Your Best People" from Harvard Business Review, "In these days of talent wars, the best way to keep your stars is to know them better than they know themselves - and then use that information to customize the careers of their dreams."

Winning the War for Talent

An organization's brand creates external and internal loyalty.  Your recruitment, selection, on-boarding, coaching, development, promotion and succession planning processes are part of your brand.  Think of each process as a means of retaining top performers and developing future stars.  When you enhance your existing processes with the use of predictive performance patterns and job matching - and then empower your managers to use this data - you will accelerate performance and strengthen your brand loyalty.