The Challenge

The past few years have brought a stronger awareness of the importance of having engaged employees in the workplace, while definitions as to what it actually means to be engaged are mostly misguided. Popular opinion asserts that happy and satisfied employees should be a priority, and many assume that if employees are happy with their work, and satisfied with their workplace, that their engagement is a given. This assertion is both wrong and reckless.

Two Truths about Engagement

• Some employees are happy to hang out by the water cooler daily for much of the day gossiping, snacking, and working hard at looking busy. Could you honestly call these happy folks engaged?
• Some team members are satisfied to do just enough to get by each day, just enough to get paid, and just enough not to get fired. These are not the behaviors any rational person would deem as engaged.

The reality is that employee engagement doesn't come from an employee being happy or satisfied; rather, that happiness and satisfaction result from an employee being engaged with his or her work, and at his or her workplace.

To dig deeper into the engagement topic, let's get past the buzzword aspect of engagement and examine insights into what it looks like in practice as well as how to create it.

How to Increase Engagement Effectively

1. Employee engagement happens when an employee is emotionally invested in the company's goals. His or her work is not just a means to a paycheck but also a place where he or she finds significant meaning and purpose. Yes, the employee wants to make money, but he or she also wants to make a difference; when engaged, he or she does not feel like just a number, but rather, a part of something special. Your ultimate few objectives (TUFs), mission, and core values are a great help in this regard.
2. The degree to which an employee is emotionally invested in a company's goals will depend largely on the strength of the relationship he or she has with his or her direct supervisor. It's incumbent on the leader to initiate the relationship with an employee and take the lead to strengthen it over time. To this end, a leader must genuinely prioritize people. Ceasing the habit of overmanaging and underleading will be a giant leap forward to achieve the healthy relationships necessary for strong engagement.
3. When a leader substitutes rules for relationships, he or she gets rebellion, not engagement. If you persist in spending more time with stuff than people, you will eventually reap rebellion from among the ranks. Rebellion manifests in many ways, from coming into work late, to doing the bare minimum to get by, to not speaking well of coworkers or the company when away from the job.
4. Empowering team members with latitude and discretion increases engagement. Helping your people think and act on their own by empowering them to make more of their own decisions, solve their own problems, and implement their own ideas builds their self-esteem and allows them to take more ownership in their jobs. Empowering is more than simply telling someone it's okay to do something. It means creating clear expectations for what you expect and helping him or her develop the skills to deliver.
5. Helping your team members develop a personal growth program improves their level of engagement. Little creates more goodwill and engagement than when you take a hands-on interest in helping the people on your team grow personally so that they can reach their fullest potential. Helping them define growth objectives and then determining the resources necessary to achieve them not only increases engagement but also builds a higher sense of loyalty to you personally and to the organization.
6. Learn to motivate each team member as a unique individual, rather than applying assembly line management. Everyone has different strengths, weaknesses, aspirations, whys, and motivations. When team members believe their boss cares enough to understand them and treat them as the unique entities they are, engagement soars.

Parting Thought

There's much more to say about employee engagement and dozens of additional strategies and tactics one can use to create it. These points, however, provide both a checklist to evaluate how you're doing as a leader and a blueprint to begin taking more proactive action to maximize engagement in your organization. They will go a long way in determining whether your team members feel like stakeholders or driven stakes. Executing these six points doesn't require a bank loan, an economic upturn, or the collapse of a competitor. They are based on you simply making the right decisions to prioritize people and the relationship you have with them. See? It's not rocket science!