5 Management Tips to Help Boost Employee Engagement

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February 4, 2021 Business

As a manager, you want your employees to take pride in their work. High employee engagement is crucial for your team to produce high-quality, consistent results. Managers, in particular, can have a huge effect on their team’s overall engagement.

You’ll inevitably encounter ebbs and flows when it comes to your employees’ engagement with work. Your team is made up of human beings with emotions, so there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that keeps everyone engaged all the time.

Ultimately, you’ll need to know your employees well enough to understand which engagement strategies mesh with their personalities. As a manager providing meaningful interactions, giving honest feedback, and showing employees appreciation are all on your plate.

Fortunately, there are some general employee engagement tips you can individually tailor to your team. At the core of these strategies are good old-fashioned empathy and team-building exercises. Read on to discover five reasons why employee engagement is so important?

Be More Transparent to Build Trust

It’s an unfortunately common scenario for office workers around the globe: a team of skilled, tight-knit employees works well together but feels disengaged because their boss never tells them how they’re performing. Employees want to know how their work is affecting their company. But a manager who holes up in their office all the time prevents this from ever happening.

A transparent relationship with your team will show them exactly how their hard work is paying off. You need to be as upfront and honest as you can with your team about why they’re doing what they’re doing. And you need to be equally transparent about why the company is doing what it’s doing, too. Otherwise, your team won’t understand why their work matters.

Your employees will be happier when they feel like they’re a part of their company’s activities and understand how they’re contributing. Plus, they’ll trust you as a manager to keep them up-to-date on the information they care about. Be as transparent as you can with your team to build a good rapport and positive working relationships.

Give Your Team the Tools They Need to Succeed

Businesses are digitizing their customer solutions and moving their assets to the cloud at breakneck speed. These rapid changes can affect the tools your team uses to get their work done. But they can also negatively impact your employee engagement if you aren’t vigilant.

Of course, having the right tools to get a job done is only half the battle. Your employees need to be able to use those tools proficiently in the first place. All too often, employees struggle with corporate bureaucracy and poor implementation of tools that hinder their productivity and just plain confuse them. You won’t notice much of an uptick in engagement if everyone’s frustrated with their new suite of tools.

Make sure to coordinate with IT, HR, and other departments as you see fit when your organization implements new tools for your team to use. You want to listen to your employees and consider their feedback if they have any. They’ll be much happier if they know you’re listening to their feedback about new tools and technologies rather than just brushing them off.

Make Responsibilities Clear to Increase Pride in Ownership

Your employees want to own their work. They want to feel good about the results they’ve achieved. Making their duties clear is one of the simplest ways to drive employee engagement. Employees who know what they’re supposed to be doing have greater opportunities to truly connect with their work.

Touch base regularly with your team to make sure they’re clear on their duties. The last thing you want is for someone to bottle up their anxieties because they’re not confident enough to talk to you. Let your employees know that you’re there to help by approaching them first. This small step will do wonders in boosting your team’s trust in you as their manager.

Employees who are clear on what’s expected of them will engage more strongly with their work. Give your team transparent responsibilities to increase their pride in ownership and the quality of their work. Drive engagement more effectively by being a good communicator and assigning clear tasks.

Recognize People’s Achievements to Make Them Feel Good

It’s going to be tough to stay engaged with your work if you’re not sure that you’re doing a good job. As a manager, you have the ability to positively influence engagement simply by giving out some kudos. But it’s up to you to make the first move and congratulate your team.

In fact, if you’re a manager, you’re responsible for any variance in your team’s engagement. Your words of encouragement are not only beneficial to employee engagement; they’re pretty much mandatory to keep everyone engaged in the long-term. Your team needs someone who can mentor them and help them make their good work become great.

It’s absolutely crucial that you foster a mentor-protege relationship with your employees if you want to keep them engaged. Let everybody know that you’re approachable as well as empathetic. This kind of behavior will turn you into a leader rather than just a manager.

Don’t Take Everything Too Seriously — We’re All Only Human

People are complicated. They have different perspectives, levels of sensitivity, and likes and dislikes. It’s what makes us human, and it’s what makes human-centric employee engagement strategies so successful. You can survey teams and measure their engagement metrics all day long, but acting like a person instead of a robot is what will truly keep employee engagement strong.

One of the best ways to get people’s minds off work and help them de-stress is by simply talking with them. Conversations with your employees don’t always need to be about results, new streams of revenue, or meeting the bottom-line. A lot of the time, people just want to talk to their managers the same way they would to a mentor or friend.

Establish a regular basis of casual conversations with your team, especially if you suspect their engagement is taking a dive. Your team will be more inclined to trust and engage with you if they know you’re invested in them as human beings, and not drones.

Don’t be afraid to organize a virtual happy hour on a Friday afternoon or do something fun for the holidays. At the end of the day, employees and managers alike are people who need time to let loose to stay focused and engaged with work.

Keep Experimenting With Engagement to Reap the Greatest Rewards

Like we mentioned earlier, there’s no end-all approach toward improving employee engagement. People are bound to have their off days, some extenuating circumstances, or personal events that make it difficult to stay laser-focused on work.

But if you can practice a bit of empathy and listen to your team’s feedback, you’ll be well on your way to boosting long-term employee engagement. It’s this kind of human-centric engagement that will make you feel proud as a manager and your employees proud of their work.