5 Ways to Keep Employees Happy and Engaged

  • Happy team cheering each other on
Happy team cheering each other on

A happy team will cheer each other on

In my recent blog post “Five Skills Every Leader Needs” I noted the need to support and encourage your team. Several readers responded they agreed that satisfied, engaged employees are the key to good company culture — and asked for more tips on this topic.

So here are a few thoughts specifically on the question: “If happy employees care more about our company, customers, and success — what can I do to keep my employees happy?”

Dozens of policies and tactical improvements can improve employees’ work lives — things like reducing bureaucracy and redundant meetings, providing flexible time off, bonuses for proven performance. But here I’ll touch on a few high-level philosophies — the big five ways to keep employees happy, engaged, productive and loyal:

1. Hire personalities that fit your philosophy

Personality and attitude can be much more important to small business success than specific skills of each employee. Skills are important, but many can be learned fairly quickly, assuming a candidate has the base level qualifications.

Lots of companies ask for a “good team player” in their job descriptions. But face it — all candidates consider themselves team players.

Think in detail about what makes you tick, how your team interacts, what your company’s goals are, and what your team needs to do to achieve them. What attitude should an employee have about customers, partners, and service providers? How do your existing team members communicate, divide the labor, and manage projects?

List specific personality traits you think will help an employee fit with your other employees, your leadership style, your daily grind, and your monthly objectives. Make a checklist and use it to consider each candidate’s style and attitude.

I’m not suggesting you discriminate based on a first impression, or hire “only people like me” — far from it. If you put in enough time to consider these details, you’ll actually realize different personality strengths complement each other, and variety is necessary to achieve all your goals. The point here is to be very aware of what traits you think your team has, and needs.

If you don’t do this, you might hire employees who fit your skill requirements, but you may find you’ve made some big mistakes that are hard to fix — for example when employees can’t share the workload effectively, or different employees approach clients in contradictory ways.

2. Be loyal to your employees

Everyone knows “the customer comes first.” But to ensure the customer is served properly, you need to put your employees first. When your employees know you have their back, care about their well-being, support them if they struggle, and help them achieve goals rather than grumbling when they don’t — they’ll want to do everything in their power to “delight” your customers.

There are many ways to show your employees are your priority.

The moment a new hire comes on board, treat them like family, take them out to lunch, get the team to welcome them, assign a volunteer to show them around and share their knowledge and love of the company.

Consistently show your team you want to help them find ways to succeed, not criticize their methods or blame them for failures. Be open and always communicate in a genuine way. When an employee has a question or you start a discussion, be totally present in the conversation, with no distractions or urgent matters to pull you away. Check in informally with each employee regularly — not for a status report, but just to support them.

Take your team’s outside lives seriously, and give them personal respect. In good times, be sure to invite your employees’ significant others to some company celebrations or parties. If troubled times hit an employee — a death in the family, an illness, a difficult time for a child — encourage the team to offer personal support, send flowers, help cover the workload, whatever helps the employee feel supported.

3. Give them a chance to flourish

If you need your team to grow, help them grow. Offer them opportunities to get away from the office to attend symposia or classes. Offer financial support if you can.

If an employee suggests they need new training, embrace that — even if the training won’t directly benefit current projects, but it’ll help the employee develop strengths important to their broader success. You want your people to reach for their highest potential, and to understand you support their personal success, not just this quarter’s numbers.

Trust your people to try new tasks outside their usual areas, when time permits. Give them leeway to launch projects they’re excited about, or work for you in new ways. They may surprise you with real results — or at least they’ll feel rewarded and unconstrained, and can bring that positive energy to the rest of their work. If you fear lost time or productivity, consider the alternative — employees who feel unfulfilled, unappreciated or burned out.

4. Let your team own the company’s success

If you want a committed team, you want each employee to know the company’s success is their success. To incite commitment, genuinely involve your employees in the big picture.

Keep your team fully informed; never hide the state of the business or industry, tell them exactly why you want to pursue a certain strategy. You might feel your decisions are obvious, but if you don’t share insights and reasoning with your team, they won’t fully grasp it. You need them to grasp it, if you want them to embrace and execute it well.

Even more importantly, when you need to make a decision that affects strategy, invite your team to offer advice and expertise. This is why you hired such thoughtful, communicative, experienced people — now’s the time to take advantage of their talent, while at the same time showing you need and value them.

It can also be useful — to boost feelings of empowerment and effective company functioning — to find ways to get various company functions to cross-pollinate. If your marketing team has ideas on how to solve customer needs via new web, network or IT tools or processes, encourage the IT and Marketing teams to develop a solution together. If your company is smaller and less compartmentalized, you might even ask your leads to exchange or rotate responsibilities, so they can learn more about what the company’s trying to achieve, and provide new perspective in each other’s areas.

Your team should understand they’re not just your employees — they own the success of the company as much as you do.

5. Recognize every effort

This is standard Human Resources 101, but recognition can’t come in half-measures, run-of-the-mill “employee-of-the-month” awards, or certificates for completing projects.

Overt recognition is a significant motivator to greater achievement. But the goal is not to create false, extraneous, extrinsic motivations for your people. The goal is to help them develop intrinsic motivation — a sense that they belong to the team, and the team’s successes belong to them. Some cynics might say “completing projects is what they’re paid to do” and be done with it. The result of that attitude is employees who, indeed, show up for their paycheck. Your employees must understand their effort makes everyone’s success possible. If you don’t realize that fact, how will they? If they don’t realize it, what will motivate them to contribute to that success?

First of all, as the business leader you must show respect, appreciation and admiration for your employees’ work, regularly — every week, in some form. Say it out loud. Say it meaningfully — that means you need to understand your employees’ roles, projects, and efforts, and think about them enough to describe honestly why you appreciate the work.

Secondly, well-completed projects and business successes deserve to be specially praised. And your team should be publicly praised for taking risks, for breakthrough ideas, and for helping another team or employee. Find a special way to commemorate special achievements, not the boring old certificate — a heartfelt thank you note signed by the whole team, a special breakfast catered by yours truly, a pair of movie tickets and a day off to use them, a flash-mob song and dance by the whole team?

Good for the gander, too

A side effect of treating your employees this way? You’ll feel much more fulfilled in your own role, and probably happier in your own life. But of course, from a business perspective, one of the best investments you can make in your company’s success is to develop great relationships with and among your employees. Positive employee attitudes — and a sense of ownership over their own role and the company’s future — have been shown to be central to an organization’s success.

Happy employees are motivated, proactive employees. Start with the pillars above. What else can you do to make sure your team feels that way? Let me know what new ideas you find to keep your employees happy and engaged!

 

2017-10-26T17:09:48+00:00

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