MightyRecruiterBefore you work on shaping up your employees, you’ll want to start with yourself. Make sure your employees see you enjoying your work, engaging with them, laughing with them and working alongside them until closing time. While there should most certainly be professional boundaries in the workplace, that doesn’t mean you can’t get to know a bit more about your employees; at least enough to learn what motivates them in their careers and any concerns they might have surrounding their professional lives. Sometimes, a successful foundation starts at the top.
Know What it Means to Truly Engage Your Employees
Rather than craft your engagement strategy in a way that’s optimized for horizontal career movement, you’ll be better off expanding your scope. The reason for this is some of your employees may want more than just the expected promotions and raises. These days, employees have a desire to be involved and interested in their work, and sometimes earning a paycheck isn’t enough to motivate them to do their absolute best while on the clock. Instead, put your focus on overall employee productivity. Find ways to successfully engage your employees’ knowledge, values and strengths. This is how you make them eager to come to work every day and more willing to stay longer if necessary.
Cut the Anchors
Are there any employees who are company assets but are always complaining or have a bad attitude? If so, you should strongly consider cutting them loose. You run the risk of these individuals ruining your successful foundation and endangering the success of your productive and well-mannered employees. No matter how talented employees with bad attitudes might be, they’re likely to only bring other employees down with their energy, which negatively impacts everyone’s performance. If you simply cannot bring yourself to let these individuals go, you can at least let them know how their attitudes are affecting everyone else and how close they are to bringing their time with your company to a close.
Shift Job Descriptions
Another way to help ensure your team remains engaged is to shift their job descriptions in a way that naturally fits their strengths and interests. Some of the ways you can do this is to utilize your older workers’ knowledge before they retire. Specifically, you can see if your older workers are interested in acting as mentors for your younger employees and teach them industry information they might not have learned in school or during their professional lives. Something else you can do to build and support a successful foundation and a more productive workplace is to give your employees free rein over the type of work they perform while still fulfilling their duties. Employees who show great aptitude or potential should be asked if they’d like to receive special training, succession planning or incentives to help them advance in their careers and remain challenged at work.
Set Short-Term Goals
If you don’t already, now is a good time to start setting short-term goals not only for your company, but for individual departments within your company. Start with a core goal and decide how each department and employee can do their part in helping to make that goal a success. It’s best to set monthly or quarterly goals in order that employees not only have something to work towards every day, but know what they are working towards each and every day. This helps to keep employees from just going through the motions and keeping an eye on the clock in anticipation for quittin’ time.
Understand ROI
As a business owner, you probably know more than a few things about ROI. See how that concept relates to keeping your team engaged. Find out what it is that inspires and motivates your employees not only at work, but in their lives outside of work as well. Next, develop a method to implement those motivations and inspirations into the work environment and find ways to reward employees for their efforts, maximizing their (and your) ROI. For more info on establishing a successful foundation that promotes the full engagement of your employees, be sure to explore more of the articles and tools found on Mighty Recruiter.