Leadership Communication: How To Impact Employee Engagement
One of the things that continue to surprise me is that when times are bad organizations still spend money on employee engagement surveys. A general look around the office or factory and tea room discussions would make it obvious to all that wanted to see it that employees are not so much engaged as they are worried about their job security. This leads us to two major issues to consider during tough times, the first is how leaders inspire confidence and innovation in an organization that appears to be in freeze mode. The second is what you should measure as an indicator of employee engagement.
First let’s tackle how to motivate employees to be innovative and confident about your organization. Ultimately it is about coming up with an effective change management approach to get all employees engaged at different levels to comprehend what their roles are in the organization and how each of them impacts the productivity of the company. Here are some things that you can consider doing. 1. Share real information about your organization and its finances and share this information with the staff of all the divisions and levels of the company that deal with customer service. 2. Go to your staff and workers for advice on how you can best improve any of the company’s products and services which you should test on a controlled scale, for instance in an individual company branch somewhere. 3. Upon completing the test you can ask workers to review the results and analyse them. 4. For ideas and innovations that actually improve performance and sales you should implement them throughout your other company branches as well. 5. Create an incentives program that will encourage employees to share ideas and motivate other team members.
It’s not so difficult, listen to employees and defer to them for advice, instead of just providing a list of tasks, emphasize the importance of their ideas by recognizing their efforts openly. This is how your company can grow and improve team dynamics and demonstrate transformational leadership that will help your company in dire times.
It is also important to make sure that the organizational change strategy and the communication management you decide on has explicit responsibilities and activities for the leadership team. Many times we just assume that it is only employees that worry about their jobs, but also managers have that insecurity and the employees under them look up to them for needed support and assurance. Planning organizational change requires that you clearly define activities and responsibilities for all members of the company. How does this relate to our last example? Basically you need to plan certain activities like; 1. Managers who share organizational information with their teams and discuss it with them transform their organization 2. Managers will display transformational leadership and team communication to pick the best ideas to be tested on chosen markets. 3. Managers will demonstrate leadership effectiveness by implementing the testing and collecting results to further discuss with their employees. 4. Senior management will make decisions on which strategies were most effective in bringing about the needed change. 5. The management team will work closely with the human resources department to come up with a recognition and incentives program to motivate their teams.
Now what should be done with employee engagement surveys? I suggest that you save all that spent money that is wasted on them and just sit back and think about a transformational leadership and change management plan like the one that is mentioned above. This will improve communications, make ideas be of a certain value and ensure that actions are taken to make those ideas work. These are all the steps that are needed to encourage employees to stay focused, and this will give them a purpose and even give them better confidence about their stability in your company because they will be helping in shaping the future of it, instead of just doing what they are told to do. Change your budgeting mindset, and focus on low cost strategies that present more opportunity, growth and innovation and the results of that on business will be the measure of employee engagement, with no survey needed.
Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on transformational leadership and change management and has spoken at conferences around the world. For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit www.transformational-leadership.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.
First let’s tackle how to motivate employees to be innovative and confident about your organization. Ultimately it is about coming up with an effective change management approach to get all employees engaged at different levels to comprehend what their roles are in the organization and how each of them impacts the productivity of the company. Here are some things that you can consider doing. 1. Share real information about your organization and its finances and share this information with the staff of all the divisions and levels of the company that deal with customer service. 2. Go to your staff and workers for advice on how you can best improve any of the company’s products and services which you should test on a controlled scale, for instance in an individual company branch somewhere. 3. Upon completing the test you can ask workers to review the results and analyse them. 4. For ideas and innovations that actually improve performance and sales you should implement them throughout your other company branches as well. 5. Create an incentives program that will encourage employees to share ideas and motivate other team members.
It’s not so difficult, listen to employees and defer to them for advice, instead of just providing a list of tasks, emphasize the importance of their ideas by recognizing their efforts openly. This is how your company can grow and improve team dynamics and demonstrate transformational leadership that will help your company in dire times.
It is also important to make sure that the organizational change strategy and the communication management you decide on has explicit responsibilities and activities for the leadership team. Many times we just assume that it is only employees that worry about their jobs, but also managers have that insecurity and the employees under them look up to them for needed support and assurance. Planning organizational change requires that you clearly define activities and responsibilities for all members of the company. How does this relate to our last example? Basically you need to plan certain activities like; 1. Managers who share organizational information with their teams and discuss it with them transform their organization 2. Managers will display transformational leadership and team communication to pick the best ideas to be tested on chosen markets. 3. Managers will demonstrate leadership effectiveness by implementing the testing and collecting results to further discuss with their employees. 4. Senior management will make decisions on which strategies were most effective in bringing about the needed change. 5. The management team will work closely with the human resources department to come up with a recognition and incentives program to motivate their teams.
Now what should be done with employee engagement surveys? I suggest that you save all that spent money that is wasted on them and just sit back and think about a transformational leadership and change management plan like the one that is mentioned above. This will improve communications, make ideas be of a certain value and ensure that actions are taken to make those ideas work. These are all the steps that are needed to encourage employees to stay focused, and this will give them a purpose and even give them better confidence about their stability in your company because they will be helping in shaping the future of it, instead of just doing what they are told to do. Change your budgeting mindset, and focus on low cost strategies that present more opportunity, growth and innovation and the results of that on business will be the measure of employee engagement, with no survey needed.
Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on transformational leadership and change management and has spoken at conferences around the world. For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit www.transformational-leadership.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.
