Leadership Communication: How To Impact Employee Engagement
It find it strange how surveys in employee and staff engagement are still conducted even though organizations reach hard times and can barely afford to do them. Transformational leaders wouldn’t need these surveys to know that by just looking at their workers in their work environments they must be all worried about how secure their jobs are or if they will still be there tomorrow. This reflects two main things to think about during hard economic times, one is how effectively leaders can motivate workers to be innovative and confident during hard times. The second is what exactly the measurement is of staff engagement tells us.
Let’s look at how to inspire your employees through team dynamics. Now the first thing is that change must take place and this change should involve you getting employees to be active when it comes to understanding the business part of the job and how they can make a difference or contribution. This is one way to do that. 1. Present real data about your business and share it with your employees at all levels especially when it comes to dealing with customers. 2. Let your employees share ideas on how they can improve the service of your company or what product you should be selling that you can test in a market in small ways, like a specific territory of sales. 3. Test those ideas that have merit for six weeks and then ask those employees who suggested the ideas to measure the results. 4. Focus on the ideas that have shown an improvement in sales and then make sure to include those ideas to the state or even to the nationwide sales activities if you have an organization that large. 5. Recognize the people behind the great ideas based on the results of those ideas so that you can start to give your workers a reason to contribute and not be disengaged.
This is how easy it is, you just have to treat your team members with respect, listen to the ideas they have through a proper communication process, and offer a way to reward those who achieve results with their ideas. This is the way to innovate when it comes to change management in your company and how you can properly address the problems you are facing in the market.
One other way is to make sure that you have activities and responsibilities for management so that you can better improve your strategy. We sometimes forget that managers are also concerned with how they can keep their jobs, and at the same time their team members look up to them for guidance as well. It is therefore important that any changes in strategy must be communicated and defined properly when it comes to the different levels of an organization. What does this mean when you look at the previous example above? It means that you need to have activities like; 1. Identifying business data and having leaders share that data with their teams through structured team communication 2. Choosing ideas for a specific market test and leaders being responsible for deciding just which market to test it on 3. Getting results in the six week test and leaders organizing brief meetings with their teams 4. Having the different levels of managers deciding on which tests worked the best and which ones will be implemented into project plans 5. Encourage leaders to share the responsibility with Human Resources to decide on the reward or recognition that should be implemented for the different teams.
As for the surveys that supposedly measure employee engagement? It is better for organizations to set those aside for the time being and follow a more effective communication process and communication management as outlined earlier. With a venue where team communication is possible and transformational leadership is encouraged, the environment for a more productive workforce is viable. With this communication process you will end up with a workforce that is more confident, it will have a greater sense of purpose in the organization, rather than just feeling like it is an easily dispensable part of the company. By effectively turning around the concept of budget cuts to a more productive concept of opportunity, development, significant growth of your company is possible, you will go beyond the goals that you set for yourselves, and at the end of it all you will realize that it had nothing to do with employee survey outcomes.
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.
