Spending time with your employees and getting to know them is an easy and effective way to engage them. Understanding their families, backgrounds, and personal goals allows you, as a manager, to build a stronger relationship with them. A study conducted by Gartner revealed that aligning employee goals and expectations with the organization's objectives has a major impact on their performance; the study observed a 22% increase in employee performance. Aaron Adams is the Vice President of Professional Services at Engagedly, where he develops and implements strategic talent solutions that help support and drive the organization's business and talent strategies.
He has a Master's degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Wayne State University and has worked as a rights management consultant and OD consultant for a Fortune 20 company. He currently leads Engagedly Teams responsible for onboarding, training, and consulting services. As an expert in the field of employee engagement, I can tell you that it is essential that you share your vision and set clear goals with your team. Research has definitely shown that employees are more productive and more likely to dedicate discretionary effort when they are engaged with their company. If you don't take steps to create an environment where you motivate and engage your employees, you'll lose a vital competitive advantage.
If you're easy-going and have a thinking personality, be sure to hire someone on your team who brings positive flashes and emotions to the workplace every day. Creating psychological safety is also important for employee engagement. If your team members feel like they're walking on eggshells, as if someone is going to get scared if they make a mistake, then you're working in a very unhealthy environment. Use a real-time feedback tool such as Fellow to recognize your teammates for their work and track their achievements. Therefore, to create psychological safety, you must ensure that you receive new ideas, questions, concerns, or suggestions from your team members with an open mind and create a safe environment so that people can speak freely, without feeling threatened by judgment or ridicule. Making employees feel part of the team is important for job satisfaction and also for overall employee satisfaction.
Employee engagement is one of the most important factors affecting the productivity, growth, and sustainability of the organization, innovation, and revenue generation. Reward your team for hard work, whether in the form of monetary rewards, gifts, perks, or more responsibility and independence. As a manager, it's important that you keep track of the performance of your team members and help them improve it from time to time. Be sure to conduct regular remote employee engagement surveys to find out what their problems are so that you can better support them and help them create a positive and productive work environment regardless of where they are. Recognize and reward your team for all their hard work even if that means sending a quick message to thank them for a job well done. Providing a solid base of resources and training for your employees to do their jobs successfully is a great way to increase their level of commitment to the rest of the group and to the organization as a whole.
It takes a lot of thought and effort to make the group feel involved, engaged, and motivated.