How can a leader tell if they have good or bad employee engagement? Well, surveys are one way. Sadly, though, they don’t get deployed often enough and they take time to get the results. I prefer the more instant kind of feedback mechanisms for gauging employee engagement...
- Employee churn. If you have double annualized employee churn, you have an engagement problem.
- Quality issues. If you have increasing product or service quality issues, you have an employee engagement problem.
- Poor Customer Satisfaction. If your customers are not happy or loyal, you have an employee engagement problem.
- Recruiting new talent. If you have poor employee engagement, you will have a poor employment brand – top talent will not want to work for you. Crappy talent will because they cannot find a job anywhere else.
- Your people smile a lot but never give you bad news. When you have an engaged culture, people do not fear for the jobs and they trust you enough to tell you the bad stuff. When people are disengaged, and they stay, they are usually trapped by the fear of losing their jobs and they smile and tell you what you want to hear. There’s a childhood fable, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where the leader is so loathed and feared that even when he walks the streets completely nude, his subjects tell him that the clothes he’s wearing are made from the finest silk known to man.
An Engaged Team
How do you tell if your team is engaged? Here’s is my list:
- Leaders and the team is vulnerable. When people feel safe, they openly and honestly talk about their weaknesses and short-comings. All leaders too openly admit what they ‘suck’ at.
- You have conflict. When people feel safe, they will engage in what I call ‘healthy conflict’ with each other and miraculously, no one gets offended.
- There’s a sense of connection and belonging. People actually like each other and will look out for each other.
- Accountability. An engaged team is one where people step up and are accountable for what they said they would do.
- Shit gets done. The best one of all. Yes, you get results without having to yell and wave your arms around.
Get out of your office and start being real. That’s how you discover if you have good or bad employee engagement. Connect with people. Make them the most important part of the business and do it authentically. If you are not able to do that, then you need to do yourself a favour and look for another job.
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Tags:
Employee Engagement,
Employee Retention,
Success,
Team,
Team Work
