How to keep employees more engaged: 5 handy tips for leaders

Encourage your employees not to rest on laurels, but to keep improving their skills and acquiring new professional knowledge.

Employee engagement is really indispensable for any company’s success. However, it’s not always easy to stimulate engagement and make people feel comfortable at work. The statistics by Office vibe proves this assertion:

1. 88% of employees are not passionate about their work;
2. Only 20% of senior managers get highly excited about their responsibilities at work;
3. Employee disengagement causes the loss of $500 billion a year (in the USA);
4. 86% of business and HR leaders think they lack a satisfactory leadership channel.

Taking into account the above-mentioned facts, the importance of leveraging employees’ strengths and emphasizing their unique selves considerably increases. Beyond that, by engaging the staff, you can determine whether the individuals are able to deal with challenging tasks and assume more responsibilities.

Finding new ways of engagement certainly requires much time and constant efforts. However, it’s worth the cost. Here are 5 things you can consider to entice and stimulate the team, making its work more effective.

Empowerment

It’s a clever idea to put your employees in situations, where they can show their worth, unleash potential, at the same time enhancing confidence and reinforcing their self-trust.

And you, as an experienced and wise leader, should allow your team members to make unsuccessful attempts while they are exploring exciting possibilities and seeking smart solutions.

Furthermore, it’s reasonable to create for your employees a position of influence to understand how they will react and what they will demonstrate. Do a test to learn how your employees will perform a leading role and collaborate with others. For sure, your team members want to feel entrusted, so, don’t go too far with micromanaging, grant them a chance to take independent decisions and bring positive outcomes.

Tension release

Quite often leaders don’t devote time to engage their employees and start unconsciously creating tension, expecting them to behave in a certain way and forgetting that they are bright personalities.

When employees are endorsed to work in the way they choose, fulfilling their own potential and not pretending to be someone else, they are sure to develop an entrepreneurial attitude they lacked before and contribute to the company’s growth.

Moreover, employees respect those leaders who let them show individual distinguishing characteristics and apply natural skills. So, do not make them stay reserved by ignoring their future opportunities and imposing a broad array of severe limitations and tight constraints. Instead, show avid interest and create a warm atmosphere at the workplace.

Gamification

Don’t get confused: the usage of gamification to engage employees has little to do with the game in its original sense. In turn, gamification’s appeal arises from memories and skills people learned from games in the childhood.

Today, you can make your employees enjoy a vast range of sophisticated gamification applications and wearables: FitBit, for example, engages teams to do sports collectively and earn rewards for health activities; Task Hammer allows to carry out employees’ must-do lists interactively. You can also make use of other custom business intelligence applications to guarantee engagement within the company.

Besides, try to create your own contest for different departments and inspire people to work efficiently and with more zeal.

Rajat Paharia in his book explains the 10 key mechanics of gamification you should take into account: fast feedback, transparency, goals, badges, leveling up, onboarding, competition, collaboration, community, points.

Success sharing

Don’t be afraid of sharing your success with employees: make them part of your accomplishments so that they can feel important, trusted and can naturally generate engagement.

Team members understand that their leader is not always right and perfect. They desire to support him/her and get acquainted not only with success, but also with possible vulnerabilities. That’s why remember to be transparent and share your journey, full of ups and downs.

Training

Encourage your employees not to rest on laurels, but to keep improving their skills and acquiring new professional knowledge. Strive to show that you are always at their disposal and willing to help attain their short-term and long-term winning goals.

Engage them into internal and external training: motivate to participate in various workshops, seminars, conferences, and internships, delegate new responsibilities when they prove to upgrade their skills.

Without any doubts there are much more ways and methods to engage employees. And you are able to create your own strategies and techniques fitted for your corporate culture. However, the above-mentioned tips can really be of great help for leaders involved in businesses of all stripes and colors.