3 Ways to Inspire Your Team and Increase Employee Engagement

The workforce is changing and companies are realizing they need to change with it. According to the Gallup Organization's State of the American Workplace report, 70% of American workers are not engaged at work. What can you do to fix that?

Here are some highlights from our recent Thought Leadership Event, where our panel of 4 industry experts discussed how their companies are inspiring and engaging employees.

1. Be who you are.

Your company is unique and what makes you different matters. So don’t try to be like everyone else. Having a clear, concise and compelling definition of who you are at your core does two inter-related things: it creates more focus for the organization which, in turn, enables you to see the full range of opportunities for the company (tightening the focus widens the blinders).

Focus on the following questions to find your company’s voice and set expectations for how you will move forward:

• What does our company need?
• What would work at our company?
• What would drive engagement?

Gain insight on strategies for boosting productivity and growing bottom line results through your employee engagement. View: Building Employee Engagement - Three Elements to Include in an Employee Engagement Strategy

2. Managers also need to be leaders.

There’s a difference between leading and managing. A leader who cannot manage has a vision of where they want to go but no idea of how to get there. A manager who cannot lead is not able to build trust and create engagement within an organization to get to where they need to go. Neither of these scenarios are practical or effective.

Here’s how to be both a manager and a leader:

• Instead of only focusing on the job, get to know your team members as people too.
• Be flexible. Everyone has a different story that requires different flexibility, so be understanding of that and have trust in your team.
• Build on your skills by attending a leadership program.

3. Change the traditional review process.

There’s talk that Amazon may be the next huge company to give up an employee review process that forces managers to rank employees against each other, making job performance all about survival of the fittest.

The traditional review process is time-consuming, outdated, and doesn’t provide much real feedback to employees. Here are a few ways to change the conversation to build a culture of continuous feedback:

• Have regular one-on-one meetings to keep the dialogue going.
• Ask questions during check-ins that are around accomplishments, challenges, and recommendations. For example: What’s going well/ not going well, what do you want to learn, what are you proud of, and what are you seeing?
• Simplify the review process and encourage real conversations.

Don't be afraid to change something that isn’t working, you will never know what works unless you try.