How to Keep the Wheels Turning: Tips for Employee Engagement

As a manager or leader, you want your team to be fully engaged, to go the extra mile, and to take risks. You want everyone to understand the big picture and work towards achieving it, even when you’re not around. But unfortunately, many employees are simply not buying into your vision. They lack engagement, and as a result, the wheels often come off the bus. How can you change things around and create a culture of engagement in your workplace?

The key to employee engagement is three-fold: clarity, hope, and commitment. In this article, we’ll explore each of these components and how they can be fostered within your team or organization.

Clarity: The One Thing You Need to Know

According to author Marcus Buckingham, the one thing you need to know about great leadership is “Discover what is universal, and capitalize on it.” What is universally required of leadership? Clarity. Specifically, an optimistic clarity about the future. As a leader, it’s your job to see what others cannot yet see and to envision the future with an optimistic clarity that inspires others to follow. Leadership is not just about providing clarity; leadership is clarity.

To get your team fully engaged, you must provide crystal-clear clarity about the future. Your employees will work their hearts out for you if they can see a great future that everyone is headed towards. So get out front and lead with your optimism and clarity.

Hope: Creating Optimism and Belief

Clarity lays the groundwork for hope. Hope has two components: an optimistic vision of the future and the belief that we have what it takes to get there. As a leader, your clarity of vision creates the foundation for this kind of hope. Before anyone can invest their blood, sweat, and tears to make your vision a reality, they must believe that it’s a place worth getting to.

Great managers play a critical role in inspiring hopefulness in teams. They help employees understand their roles and leverage their strengths to achieve organizational goals. They empower and encourage employee growth to build confidence and hopefulness that result in more success. When clarity and true hopefulness exist in an organization, the stage is set for the third and final component of total engagement: commitment.

Commitment: Taking the First Step

Commitment is the action piece. It’s time to start doing something with clarity and hope. It requires taking the first step towards change and growth. Commitment is the point of no return, where there’s no turning back. If organizational change sometimes feels like going over a cliff, then clarity and hope help envision making the descent, and commitment is taking the first step over the edge.

While clarity is the domain of leadership and engendering hopefulness is the domain of great managers, commitment is the responsibility of the whole team. The team must take that first step together, and every required step after it, until the goal is reached.

The Perfect Recipe for Employee Engagement

So, if you want to achieve complete engagement with your employees, the recipe is pretty simple: Give complete clarity. Be the leader and help your employees see your vision of the future. Empower your managers to provide feedback and give opportunities to build employees’ confidence in themselves and the organization. Connect employees’ strengths with the task at hand. If you’ve done your part as a leader, you’ll get passionate engagement, and everyone will take that first step towards extraordinary growth and change together and keep walking.

Tags:

employee engagement, leadership, management, vision, strength, commitment.