How can I get my team to be more engaged?
How many team members do you think are engaged at work? How many are going through the motions? How many are disengaged?
These are the hard questions facing leaders across the United States. This is because employees make crucial daily decisions that can affect their organization. That is why it isn’t very comforting to imagine that most American workers are disengaged.
According to a Gallup poll, in 2021, 34% of employees were engaged, 50% were going through the motions, and 16% were disengaged.
Engaged Employees are Productive Employees
Today’s leaders must constantly focus on strengthening the capabilities of their employees. If appropriately implemented, engagement is the necessary stimulant to enhance your team’s performance.
Gallup’s research also shows that creating an engaging environment leads to fewer defects, better customer ratings, higher profitability, more productivity, lower turnover, and better safety.
Engaged employees make substantial contributions. They are enthusiastic about their organization’s continuous progress.
Creating Engagement
A Master of Arts in organizational leadership from Charleston Southern University teaches the importance of keeping teams engaged, motivated, happy, and productive. Here are four easy ways:
1. Find ways to connect with team members individually. Communicate daily with your employees. Show a passion for their interest. Find ways to align their goals with the success of the organization. When employees feel supported, they embrace an entrepreneurial attitude, thus leveraging engagement.
Engagement isn’t something that leaders can command. It must be earned. When management ignores engagement, employees frequently provide less effort. Leaders need to take an active role in generating engagement. It starts when the leader is intentional about connecting with his followers.
2. Develop your employees’ strengths. Each team member has their perspective, stability, and weaknesses. Professors at CSU teach that good leaders prepare followers, remove obstacles, and diligently work to align employees with the organization’s mission.
Developing worker strengths is more important than improving weaknesses.
According to research by Gallup, emphasizing strengths can nearly eliminate active disengagement. Employees who regularly use their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged at work.
3. Improve employee well-being. Employees should not be expected to separate their professional lives from their personal lives. Each employee brings their complete self to work, and their well-being impacts organizational performance.
Leadership is about having the backs of your employees. Leaders who care about employee well-being create an environment where employees feel supported. If you have your employees’ backs, you often have their hearts.
Who wants to engage with a leader that doesn’t have their back?
Leaders must become more emotionally intelligent to stimulate employee engagement. People don’t forget how you make them feel. If you support them, they will help you.
4. Leaders need to empower their employees. Empower your employees to discover their full potential. If not, you will never know what they can accomplish. Empowerment encourages your team to work harder because they know you trust them.
It may sound easy, but empowering staff requires a leader to let go, step aside, and watch from the sidelines. A confident leader must allow employees to fail, help them recover, and try again. When employees are trusted with responsibility, they become more engaged.
Allow your employees to discover their potential. Most engaged employees are those whose leaders have confidence in them.
The Proof is in the Pudding
Many organizations are embracing transformational leadership. Leaders embrace the full potential of their employees—allowing employees to be their authentic selves to leverage their strengths.
I have experienced this since I was once deemed a high-potential employee by a previous employer. Leaders in my organization invested in my potential. They did not assume that I was too young to handle the duties of leading individuals twice my age. As a result, I blossomed in this new role.
I led my team through a severely short-staffed fiscal year. This set up several complex multi-million-dollar contracts and garnered a district-wide team award for outstanding service. I will forever be grateful to those leaders who empowered me to achieve the most extraordinary results.
Jorge Alvarez served in the United States Air Force as a contracting officer. Currently, he is a Contracting Officer with the Bureau of Land Management. He writes multimillion-dollar contracts to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands to ensure present and future generations enjoy them. Jorge is pursuing a Master of Arts in organizational leadership.
