Do you know if they are engaged? Did you socialize it first?
I was talking with a friend the other day who told me that she just started a new role in the human resource department of an office supply chain. The first thing the CEO told her was that he felt that the employees really needed to be more engaged. She told me she cringed when she heard that. The last organization she was at she tried to engage employees and got nowhere. I asked her what she meant by that. She noted that she had developed an entire plan to engage employees – through a variety of ways including social media, an increase in the number of “all hands” meetings and requested help from the management team in engaging employees – nothing worked and the management team certainly didn’t help out. I asked her what made her decide that her approach – the plan she developed to engage the employees – was the right plan? Her response – she had based it on a number of articles she had recently read on engaging employees.
Do you know where she went wrong? My friend (who is fantastic at what she does) missed an important component of engaging employees. She never bothered to determine in what ways employees were already feeling engaged or disengaged or why they were feeling as they were.
You can’t engage employees if you don’t have a bit of background as to why you are trying to engage them – what are the issues? Why are the employees not engaged now? Has something changed in the recent past to cause them to disengage? Is there new management in the organization? Are new employees not a good fit for the culture? And certainly you cannot expect to develop an employee engagement program and then simply toss it out there and expect that everyone in the company will be all excited about it and ready to get started and get engaged. You need to socialize the initiative after doing a bit of homework as to what is going on.
Review our previous article on Conducting Employee Engagement Surveys for some suggested questions for your survey.
Once you have figured out your issues – begin to socialize your employee engagement initiative. Use emails, hallway conversations, breakfast roundtables, lunch & learns, a company portal site, a newsletter or any other way that works for your company. Don’t build any employee engagement plan on your own. Pull together a team represented by individuals from every department – those who are not engaged and those who are engaged. Get both managers and individual contributors involved. With the team:
- Determine the issues around engagement and disengagement
- Find solutions to the problem
- Develop a plan to reengage the workforce
- See a previous article that includes David Zinger’s Employment Engagement Model: Do You Know How to Engage Your Employees.
- Socialize the plan with the workforce to get buy-in
Keep at it! Remember that engaging the workforce is not a one-time event – you don’t stop when you get a survey back that says all is OK. Engagement is ongoing – just as professional development of employees should be. Constant change in an organization means you need to continuously engage your employees.
This article just touches the tip of engaging employees. There is lots of information available on engaging employees and best practices for doing so. Figure out what works best for your organization. Remember that employees must always be engaged – they must feel as if their contributions make a difference to the organization. Because I can tell you – those contributions most certainly do! And if you don’t engage your employees, they will go elsewhere.
Your thoughts? What are some of your best practices for engaging employees? What has worked or hasn’t worked in your organization? Please share in the Comments field below. Thank you!
