How To Improve Employee Engagement At Workplace

Employee engagement goes a long way in determining productive outcomes for both the individual employee and the organization as a whole. While engagement has been improving, the rate at which it is increasing is still relatively slow. 

Going by Gallup data, only about 34% of American workers report that they are engaged at work while the number worldwide is 13%. 

Several factors hinder employee engagement, such as job market unease, distrust of managers, organizational tumult and lack of cohesion between members of teams, and other reasons specific to employees. The good news is that organizations can significantly improve employee engagement by changing how they relate to them and pay attention.

Here are 9 strategies applicable to all organizations to improve their employee engagement.  

Set the Tone at Onboarding 

Onboarding is the critical time to connect new employees with the teams and the organization. It needs to be exciting enough but not overwhelming. Follow the best practices such as introducing mentors who aren’t managers, prioritizing building relationships with coworkers, including the executive level leadership at onboarding events and meetings and ensuring smooth transitions to regular work.  

Measure Your Employee Engagement 

Without a way to measure the employee engagement levels, your program won’t meet the set goals. Using employee engagement surveys is essential to collect data on where the teams stand and the areas that need improvement.

Conduct the surveys more than once a year and aim for 100% participation. Pulse surveys are excellent tools to get an instant idea about the state of engagement in your organization.

 

Speed Up Feedback, Appreciation and Rewards

Reinforcing positive behavior is an effective way to improve performance in employees. The trick is that the appreciation and rewards given for good performance have to be immediate, if not timely. Letting months pass between appreciations would dampen the enthusiasm.

Therefore employees need to be recognized proudly and loudly to set an example that motivates others to perform better. 

Align Employees with the Company’s Core Values 

Belongingness is another strong determinant for employee engagement. The secure feeling comes with being accepted and included in a group with a robust individual identity.

Having the employees align with the company's core values by promoting them through the work culture is an effective way to condition them to pick up the values and develop a sense of belonging. 

Maintain Transparency 

Transparency is often underestimated as a factor that contributes to trust and, ultimately, employee engagement. Trust also fosters a sense of belonging to the organization and helps them realize their link to the wider teams and stakeholders. 

You can start by promoting transparency in the work culture and break down barriers between teams by fostering cross-team relationships. Also include discussions about important company metrics in the general meetings. 

Give Individual Attention 

As the workforce becomes more multigenerational, multiethnic and multinational, it helps tailor engagement approaches centered more on the individual to help employees feel valued. 

When you understand the individual tendencies of the employees, it becomes easier to assign roles and responsibilities they are most comfortable doing and have the best chance of excelling. Surveys that help organizations hire people who are best suited for specific jobs can boost engagement. 

Listen to Employees

Listening to your employees is the simplest way to convey that their voice matters and are valued members of the organization. The approach helps to quickly pinpoint and solve problems and predict problems that could arise. 

Companies are increasingly using quarterly or monthly pulse surveys to understand trends and find ways to improve engagement. 

Provide Training and Coaching 

Your organization’s focus on the continuous development of its employees communicates that they are valued and care about their growth. When your employees feel that the company is investing in their future, their engagement and productivity increases. 

One-on-one coaching by mentors and managers is another crucial ingredient that reinforces your organization's commitment to its workforce.

 

Prioritize Feedbacks 

Engagement with your employees is not possible without feedback. Their word matters, so if you’re not soliciting their feedback, do it right away. To make it friendlier, keep the feedback anonymous and easy to access. Once the feedback is received, come up with a plan of action for it or share your reasons why it’s not possible to change something privately or when appropriate. 

Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a necessity in all organizations today. To help your employees reach their best performance, it is essential to make them feel valued and become a part of their professional growth. Software solutions offer a platform through which it is possible to measure employee engagement in a meaningful way, implement the strategies discussed above, and offer rewards and recognition.

About the Author:

Kathleen O'Donnell is a freelance writer and employee communications and culture expert, with 6+ years of experience in corporate internal communications. She’s also a full-time traveler who loves spending her time writing in little cafes across the world.

Four Ways to Promote Transparency in the Workplace

Transparency is the practice of being open and honest with others, no matter how challenging it might be. For both personal and professional relationships to thrive, you need to eliminate the stigma that comes with being straightforward. 

Workplace transparency is proven to breed long-term success. Done well, transparency creates trust between employers and employees, helps improve morale and lower job-related stress while increasing employee engagement and boosting performance. And being transparent costs nothing, which gives it an exceptional ROI. 

If you want to create transparency where you work and encourage those around you to do the same, here are four ways you can get started. 

1. Eliminate ambiguity.  

Remove any potential for confusion from all workplace communication, including company guidelines, roles, responsibilities and processes. Accountability begins with a clear understanding of who is responsible for which parts of the business, and employees struggle when management leaves important information open for interpretation. To avoid potential problems, follow up often and be firm about your expectations for open communication at all levels in the future. 

2. Provide access to information 

Within an organization there is often a lot of information that is not available to employees. Often this information is not made public because it is sensitive or for some other reason. However, there might be information that can be shared with employees, but isn’t. In order for you, as a leader to be transparent, you should consider if more information should be available to employees, and provide access to it. 

3. Involve people in decision making 

What’s even better than explaining your decision, it to involve others in the decision making process. You can do this in a number of different ways. Sometimes a quick poll on a subject can be enough to get input from others, in other cases you might want to hold a workshop or brainstorming session in order to make a collaborative decision. This approach to decision making does not only make you more transparent as a leader, but can also help you come to better decisions for your organization. 

4. Build a culture of empowerment 

Empowering employees means trusting them to make decisions about your organization. This is a key part of building a transparent culture. Empowered employees are more independent and productive. It also encourages collaboration and cultivates a safe space where everyone can express their opinions. Employees and other people don’t have to be concerned about being penalized for making a mistake. Instead, they’re encouraged to learn from the experience. 

At its core, transparency is about maintaining an open dialogue so everyone is heard, able to share, and empowered to do their best work. 

Bringing this transparency into your workplace won’t always be easy, but you may find the rewards are worth the work it takes to make it happen. 

Lean Quote: Four Most Important Words In An Organization

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"What do you think?"   —  Tom Peters

Use the Four Magic Words “What Do You Think?”: This is a favorite quote from management guru Tom Peters. Asking your employees for their ideas is the ultimate display of respect and empowers them to solve their own problems.

I started blogging in June of 2004, and the best part of it, frankly, is the wonderful comments that come from India at 1 a.m. or come from anywhere. And one morning when I logged on, I had gotten a lovely comment from a guy by the name of Dave Wheeler. And it went like this: “What are the four most important words in an organization?”

And the four words were: What. Do. You. Think.

And I thought about it and I thought, “My God. This is just bloody amazing.” What does What Do You Think mean? What Do You Think, when you say it to me, means: You are a person of value who has an opinion that I want to hear. And so, I’ve started taking it to its ultimate extreme and saying, “Okay, I want you to keep a little scorecard. Keep it in your pocket, wherever else. How many times” —and I do, everybody’s watching this— “how many times in the course of a day do you say—not five words, not three words, not 10 words—What Do You Think?”

You know, we hear this about empowerment and that about empowerment and this program and that program and this training course and that training course. I would argue, in the world of engaging people, nothing is better than the four words: What Do You Think? Try it. Count it. Measure yourself. See what happens.

Continuing to Grow in Your Leadership Career

Image Source: pexels.com

Truly great leaders never stop developing their careers. There is always room to grow and adapt. Improving your skills in this area benefits both you and your team, and can potentially advance your company to the forefront of its industry.

How do top leaders manage their responsibilities and continue to advance their skills, management style, and careers? First, they assess their existing expertise to discover strengths and weaknesses. Then, they find the best approach to improve their needs.

Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Better Leader?

Your first step is to take ownership of your future career. It does not serve you to believe you are entitled to a promotion or advancement based on your current work history, particularly if you do not feel like you are moving forward. To be a better leader, you must be proactively improving your skills and ability to adapt to challenges that impact your work, team, or company.

Once you take the step to move forward and sharpen your leadership abilities, examine the qualities that make a leader successful to see how you measure up, especially when managing teams. These traits include: 

●       Showing your team that you care about their needs. It’s important to listen to your employees’ concerns to improve productivity and team communication.

●       Allow everyone to contribute by delegating tasks appropriately and share the credit equally. When mistakes are made, be willing to focus on finding a solution rather than assigning blame.

●       Guide your team clearly but avoid micromanaging them.

To improve in these areas, learn new ways of managing your team. Just remember that there is always room to grow even if you feel adept as a leader. Some ways you can achieve this include advancing your education, updating your leadership style, and becoming a more innovative leader.

Advancing Your Education

Successful leaders may think it’s a waste of time to advance their education, but there are degree options that can provide you an edge in your career. An executive MBA (EMBA) is an excellent choice for mid-career leaders who already have plenty of work experience under their belts. Some of the benefits it provides include:

●       Networking with other professionals can increase your business connections.

●       Refine and adapt your current skills to fit high-level business opportunities, such as moving from a regional leader to a global executive.

●       Growing confidence for jumping into entrepreneurship.

Investing in an MBA can be costly and time-consuming, but flexible options such as online and part-time programs can help you develop the skill set you need in a manageable framework. 

Updating Your Leadership Style

In 2020, the business world had to adapt on the fly as the pandemic forced many companies to radically alter their working standards. Successful leaders updated their management style for today’s business market. This is especially crucial if you’ve been in management for many years.

Here are some ways that you can update your leadership techniques for today’s marketplace.

Focus on Employee Development

It’s become critical for managers to put employees more top of mind by becoming more sensitive to their needs and concerns. And, just as you want to advance your career, your team members feel the same way. Fostering employee development is a critical way to foster employee engagement, loyalty, and productivity.

The modern business world is constantly changing and adapting. Help your team stay ahead of the curve by offering flexible learning options and development activities that help them grow too. Regular group learning is a good way to support employees and strengthen relationships.

Another way to build team rapport is with extracurricular team-building activities that build trust and loyalty. These can even include outdoor challenges or online problem solving. By focusing on employee development, you can have great confidence that your staff won’t seek that encouragement elsewhere.

Foster an Inclusive and Flexible Workplace

Today’s workers expect to operate in an inclusive environment to feel empowered and take ownership of their work. This may mean, for example, rethinking the workspace to take down barriers and creating an open floor plan. Better employee engagement and team building is a benefit of this type of redesign.

Diversity in business is also critical and can even improve company performance overall. This means including people of all races, genders, and ages when building a team. It also means ensuring that people with disabilities can be hired and accommodated.

Another option that has become more widely accepted since the pandemic is offering employees flexible work options. Allowing team members to work remotely has been shown to improve productivity. Experience in managing several remote teams is a key skill all leaders need to have in today’s marketplace.

Become an Innovative Leader

Employee development and inclusivity are just two aspects of creating an adaptive business culture with 21st-century leadership. An adaptive culture supports flexible options for employees, promotes transparency in leadership, provides an atmosphere of growth for team members, and supports business sustainability. Start by making these improvements in your teams.

Once you have gained some traction, share how your team improved with upper management. You may need to convince management to make these innovative changes. It’s best to have proof of success on hand when doing so but taking charge in these areas will make you stand out as a forward-thinking leader in your firm. 

Continued growth in your leadership career is always possible. By advancing your education, updating your leadership style, and becoming more innovative in your approach, you can become a top leader in your field. Help your company reach new heights as you advance your expertise.  

About the Author: Luke Smith is a writer and researcher turned blogger. Since finishing college he is trying his hand at being a freelance writer. He enjoys writing on a variety of topics but technology and business topics are his favorite. When he isn't writing you can find him traveling, hiking, or gaming.

15 Guiding Principles of Lean

In order to gain a competitive edge, many companies have adopted lean manufacturing (or lean thinking) as a keystone for success in today’s global market. Lean manufacturing has enabled businesses to increase production, reduce costs, improve quality, and increase profits by following key principles:

Identify Value

The first principle of lean manufacturing pertains to defining value. It is important to understand what value is before anything else within the process. Value is what the customer is willing to pay for. It is important to discover the actual needs of the customers. At times, the consumer may be unable to properly articulate what exactly they want, which is common in areas of novel products or technology.

Continuous Flow

Efficient product flow requires items to move from production to shipping without interruption and can be achieved by strategically organizing the work floor. Every factor, from people and equipment to materials and shipping, must be taken into account to ensure products seamlessly move through the production process.

Create Pull

Inventory is one of the biggest wastes within a production facility. The overall goal of a pull-based system is to limit inventory and work in process (WIP) items while ensuring that the requisite materials and information are available for a smooth workflow. A pull-based system allows for Just-In-Time delivery and manufacturing where products are created at a time they are needed and in the quantities needed.

Level the Work

One of the foundational lean principles of lean manufacturing is levelized production. The basis of this principle is that the workload is the same (or level) every day. Most manufacturing companies are at the mercy of their customers for orders. Before producing product, they wait to get orders. This leads to increased delivery lead time which may not satisfy customer requirements.

Eliminate Waste

Waste in the value stream is any activity, which the customer is not willing to pay for since it adds no value to the product or service and often, is consuming resources. The waste can be broken into two categories: non-value added but necessary and non-value & unnecessary. The later is pure waste and should be eliminated while the former should be reduced as much as possible. Waste exists in all parts of the business – front office to the factory.

Kaizen Mindset

Kaizen, a philosophy of continuous improvement, can help businesses with this shift by creating a culture where workers seek perfection. Kaizen focuses on making small, incremental changes and requires every worker, from the corner office to the production floor, to help improve business practices. Over time, Kaizen will result in increased efficiency, lower costs, greater productivity, and better quality products.

Visualize Problems

Visual management aims to make the situation easily understood merely by looking at it. The goal is to get as much information as possible with as little observation or time as possible. Visual management is used to share information, work standards, build on those standards, highlight problems, stop problems occurring and prevent problems altogether. If visual management has been done well, everyone in your factory understands and knows how to fix an issue if something is wrong. Visual management complements well with the idea of going to the real place.

Stop and Fix

It’s so easy to just ignore problems when they pop up because they keep you from being productive. Truth be told, it’s easier in the long run to stop and fix the issue right away because you’ll be doing whatever is necessary to make sure the problem will NOT re-occur.

Use root cause analysis and the five-whys to figure out why a problem occurs, figure out what can be done to make sure the problem won’t come back, and make that fix. The more you attack problems and fix them, the more the organizational culture will begin to see the simplicity in doing so and the benefits realized by not having as many breakdowns or repeated repairs. This will build momentum toward a change in culture of not tolerating problems and continuous repairs.

Creativity Before Capital

Simply put, this principle demands that we think more about making our improvements by utilizing what is nearby without spending capital dollars. Dr. Shigeo Shingo preached to engineers not to become a "Catalog Engineer". Catalog Engineers spent all of their time looking for solutions in a catalog and buying a quick fix. He would say to throw out the catalog and go to gemba. Creativity before capital is the lost principle of lean in America.

Standardize Work

Standardized work is the name given in lean manufacturing for documenting the steps of a job task and the sequence in which those should be performed. You can think of standardized work as defining who does the task, when they do it, and how they do it.

The documentation of standardized work should be done in a collaborative process with people who actually do the job task as part of their job as well as others–including perhaps engineers and supervisors.

Standardizing the work adds discipline to the culture, an element that is frequently neglected but essential for lean to take root. Standardized work is also a learning tool that supports audits, promotes problem solving, and involves team members in developing poka-yokes.

Built in Quality

Another key lean manufacturing principle is Quality Built In, or Jidoka. The idea behind this principle is that quality is built into the manufacturing process. Quality is built into the design of the part. Quality is built into the packaging. Throughout all areas of the product, from design to shipping, quality is built into the process.

Jidoka builds quality into the process through detection or prevention.  Each lean manufacturing process will be designed to highlight any abnormality so that the employee can stop the process.  Stopping the process so that the problem can be fixed is a key part of the Jidoka lean principle.

Develop People

In order to fully realize potential, you’ll have to add knowledge, skills, and experience. Don’t expect your people to do their best if you don’t equip them with the training they need to perform. And don’t expect your potential to spring forth in a final draft; it takes time to hone your skills and build your confidence. This could come from formal schooling, from the school of hard knocks, or from both. Either way, your education is the house your realized potential will live in.

Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy Empowerment happens when employees use the company tools to solve problems. Build cross functional teams to improve quality and productivity. Work hard to reinforce the company culture and assure it is followed over the course of years.

Respect for People

The most valuable resource to any company are the people who work for it. Without the people, businesses do not succeed. The respect for people principle is made up of Respect and Teamwork.  This approach allows the company to leverage and utilize the collective problem solving capability of the employees to drive improvement. Most people want to perform well in their jobs. The employees want to earn a decent living and have a sense of worth while working. They want to feel like they have contributed to the company goals, like their work and effort has meant something.

Go See For Yourself

Data can tell you a lot of the story, but it can’t tell you the whole story. Going to see the process or activity yourself lets you gain a better understanding of what’s truly happening, information that can transcend the data. Solve problems and improve processes by going to the source and personally observing and verifying data rather than theorizing on the basis of what other people or the computer screen tell you.

Seek Perfection

While seeking perfection may seem straightforward, it is often one of the most difficult principles to successfully apply in the workplace. Seeking perfection requires companies to continuously improve their practices and often requires a shift in the workplace culture. All employees should attempt to strive toward perfection while delivering products based on the customer needs.

These principles of lean manufacturing can help companies to operate more efficiently. Implementing lean concepts is beneficial for the bottom line since greater efficiency leads to better profitability. It also creates a positive customer experience which improves overall satisfaction and enhances your brand’s reputation.

Lean Quote: Creativity and Innovation Enhance Business Growth and Development

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things."   —  Theodore Levitt

The companies that have done the best over the long haul are those who are the most creative and innovative. These organizations don’t copy what others do; instead, they may use innovative ideas from others as a spring board to come up with a unique application, product, or service for themselves. They tend to distance themselves from the competition rather than compete with them. If they see another company copying what they do, they create something new and better. In other words, they are able to leverage their creativity and their innovative capabilities to attain long-term success.

It’s easy to get confused between creativity and innovation. In many ways they rely on each other. Creativity and innovation are often seen as interchangeable. However, while there is overlap between them, they’re different. It’s important to understand and apply that difference in your innovation strategy.

Creativity is the act of conceiving something new, whether a variation on a theme or something wholly new. It’s about harnessing the power of the mind to conceive new ideas, products plans, thought experiments, tastes, sensations or art. Creativity can be a form of expression or a way of solving problems.

Innovation is the act of putting something into practice. It’s about changing a common or long-standing process by improving it. It’s only by having a status quo in existence, that you can develop it in order to innovate. So, while creativity and innovation share strong links, the processes are entirely different.

Innovation is about taking newly created ideas and developing them into something useful and practical. In many ways, innovation is the process of converting theory into action.

Creativity and innovation can be the pathways for your business to reach new heights of product value, process improvement, productivity, marketing success, and internal harmony.  The creative process can lead to novel ideas and concepts.