The management team is crucial to building sustainable employee engagement. That is why the following elements are essential in the ” Employee Engagement Strategies Checklist “:
Check in on your managers.
Managers are more likely to be burned out and disengaged than their teams. Make sure your managers are in a good place going into the new year by doing the following:
- Begin with listening. Gallup has found that identifying key listening posts for managers makes their needs known and helps establish ways to support them as effective team leaders.
- Improve leadership communication. Only three in 10 managers strongly agree their supervisor keeps them informed about what is going on within their organization. By providing straightforward, regular communication about organizational goals and policies, managers can reinforce and communicate priorities more effectively to their teams.
- Train and develop managers. Only 48% of managers strongly agree that they currently have the skills needed to be exceptional at their job. Organizations must teach managers to have meaningful conversations at the right frequency with their teams. They need more training on best practices in employee engagement and performance development. And they need more support when it comes to identifying their team’s strengths and coaching them with those strengths in mind.
- Establish coaching support to prevent burnout. Gallup recommends having a meaningful weekly conversation with each team member — this applies to coaching managers too. If you want to truly support your managers, spend more time with them. Managers need to feel that their leaders care and that they’re receiving continuous development in their careers while balancing their personal wellbeing.
- Create a community of shared accountability. The most rewarding parts of being a manager often come from strong partnerships and friendships. But busy schedules and remote work can hinder these supportive, informal interactions. Leaders must intentionally build a community of managers that nurtures peer relationships and mentorship.
Prepare managers to have meaningful conversations with their employees.
Researchers studied the most common characteristics of extremely meaningful and less meaningful conversations. These are the top five characteristics of meaningful conversations, in order of importance:
- Recognition or appreciation for recent work.
- Collaboration and relationships.
- Current goals and priorities at work.
- The length of the conversation: Between 15 and 30 minutes is enough time for a meaningful conversation, but only if it happens frequently.
- Employee strengths or the things they do well: Managers can have much more meaningful discussions about how each person gets their work done if those conversations are based on what they do best.
The takeaway is that feedback is meaningful to employees when their manager focuses on recognition, collaboration, goals and priorities, and strengths. And if these conversations happen every week, they can be brief. Naturally, problems and challenges will arise — and managers and employees should discuss them. But to improve engagement, managers must have conversations that inspire each individual.
How can we help? We’ve studied employee engagement for years and can help you strengthen engagement; whether you’re just starting out and need a trustworthy survey or ready to incorporate engagement principles into your organizational culture.
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