Five Tips To Engaging Employees

Employee disengagement and unhappiness can result in lower productivity, which affects the financial side. However, lack of employee retention also can result, with its many costs for replacement: recruiting fees, overtime pay to those covering job duties, ramp-up time for replacements, as well as outplacement fees and continued benefits if termination occurs.

Here are five tips to ensure you get the best from your people:

1. Upon an employee first starting, make sure there is plenty of hands-on mentoring involved. This not only shortens the learning curve, but actually sets the attitude of the new employee positively. They feel that they belong. They feel valued from Day One. Those left to their own devices will feel as though their work doesn't matter right from the start. Their positive, gung-ho attitude will begin to decline immediately. Much work will have to be done later on to turn that perception around.
2. Make sure the employee understands that there is no job in the organization that is more important than another. The receptionist who answers the phone should be known as, "The Director Of First Impressions." Is that position any less important than management? Every job is necessary. Help your people change their attitudes about the importance of their work. Every job carries with it responsibilities for the success of the entire organization.
3. We all need to know how we're doing. Left unchecked, a problem performance behavior can turn attitudes of the other employees cancerous within the organization. Others see a behavior going un-addressed and assume that the behavior is acceptable. Supervisors are coaches. Coaches build on strengths and help turn problem areas of performance around. Like an airplane computer, supervisors must make small corrections to keep the organization moving straight ahead.
4. Balanced employees are more productive. So while attempts may be made to ensure each employee receives the proper professional training, personal training cannot be excluded. The work ethic and attitude of the employee gets better when the individual gets better. Better people offer better service, make better decisions, contribute better and overall, help better the organizations. Improve the individual within the organization and the organization must improve as a result.
5. The engaged employee can be your best spokesperson for attracting new talent to your organization. Marketing strategies, interviewing/hiring processes and recruiting firms can be beneficial, but the truth is that the attitude of an engaged employee will do more to solidify a potential employee's decision to join the organization than anything else you use. Also, the more engaged your people are, the less attrition and staff-turnover you will have (not to mention how you will reduce the number of sick-days). Engaged employees want to work and those looking for work want to go where the work is engaging.

Being engaged on the job is an attitude. The more engaged they are, the more productive they are. So how engaged are you in your work?