When it comes to having engaged employees, perhaps even more influential than an employee’s direct boss is the boss’ boss. According to Julie Gebauer, Don Lowman and Joanne Gordon, authors of Closing the Engagement Gap: How Great Companies Unlock Employee Potential for Superior Results (Penguin Group), the top driver of employee engagement is “senior management’s sincere interest in employee well-being.” Yet while 75 percent of employees trust their immediate managers, only about half (53 percent) of employees trust their organization’s senior leaders, according to the 2008 Blessing White study The State of Employee Engagement.
How can senior management earn the trust of their employees and drive employee engagement?
Because senior managers’ main focus is on their direct reports, they tend to overlook employees at lower levels. While it may be difficult to enlarge the scope of senior management responsibility by dedicating more time and energy to lower level employees, it is certainly worthwhile. Engaged employees contribute more to the bottom line, and their turnover rate is significantly lower.
The authors have devised five ways to increase employee engagement through more involved senior management. Regarding lower level employees, senior managers need to:
- Know them – As companies spend enormous resources analyzing the preferences and habits of their customers, so they should get to know what is important to their employees. This is the first step in getting employees to change the way they work and improve their level of engagement.
- Grow Them – Creating a culture of learning that furthers the financial advancement of the company, while simultaneously giving professional and intellectual opportunities for growth of the individual, is paramount to stimulating employee productivity and engagement.
- Inspire Them – Employees want to feel like their work has meaning and value. Managers can inspire their employees by clearly setting forth their values and priorities and by creating a sense of pride in the work that they and the company do.
- Involve Them – People give more to their jobs when they feel like active participants. Involving them includes informing employees about business operations and challenges; gathering employee input; encouraging collaboration with colleagues; and giving people freedom to act to further the mission of the company.
- Reward Them – While pay and benefits are important and cannot be overlooked, appreciation and recognition are even more effective at boosting engagement.
Engagement is the key driver of overall organizational performance. Reaching out to your employees, getting to know them as individuals, and being open, communicative and helpful is the most direct route to higher engagement.
As Expeditors International of Washington Inc. CEO Peter Rose said to the Wall Street Journal, “You take care of employees. They take care of customers. And that takes care of Wall Street.”
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