Staff Engagement: 3 Easy, No Cost Tools to Connect with Your Staff
- GeGe Beall, SPHR
- Oct 31, 2016
- 4 min read
Your staff: What do they REALLY want? In their 2015 Employee Job Satisfaction & Engagement Survey, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) polled employees across the country in a wide variety of industries & positions asking them to rank the importance of almost 40 aspects of job satisfaction. Not surprisingly, benefits, compensation & job security came in at numbers 3, 4 & 5 respectively. While it's good for you to know what's important to your staff, more than likely, as a leader, you probably have very little control over these particular aspects.
However, you CAN most definitely impact the other 3 out of the top 6 which can be summed up with these key words: respect, trust, & relationship.
1. Respectful treatment of all staff at all levels
2. Trust between employees & senior management
6. Relationship with immediate supervisor
So, what can you, as a leader, do to positively influence these important aspects to keep your staff engaged & content? Here are 3 simple tools that you can try tomorrow.
1. Say Thank You--Often
"Hey, thanks!" It seems simple and is simple, yet according to a recent survey, 58% of staff nationwide say that they aren't regularly thanked by their supervisor. Staff devote most of their waking hours &, frankly, most of their life to work. Yes, compensation is crucial. But it's not enough. Everyone wants to feel like the work they're devoting their life to has purpose & meaning. Feeling appreciated is at the core of who we are. So, tell them! It costs you nothing but will go a long way towards earning the trust & respect of your staff.
Be sure to consider individual needs when saying thanks. Most staff love public praise (like at a staff meeting), while some would cringe if thanked in front of a group. The key is to make thanks personal & genuine.
An especially effective form of thanks is to mail a handwritten note to your staff member's home. Who receives handwritten mail anymore? And who receives mail from their boss at home? It's instantly special & will probably be posted in a place of honor on the fridge for all to see. Extra added bonus: family gets to see the thanks which will be an added source of pride. All you need is 3-4 lines of genuine thanks.
2. Improve Your Compliment to Complaint Ratio
I get it. You're a leader & your BUSY. No news is good news, right? No, no it's not. If the only time your staff hears from you is when there's a problem, well, then there is a problem & it's with your leadership.
Humans are wired to remember the negative more than the positive. In his book, Inside the Magic Kingdom, Tom Connellan looks at the impact of compliments to complaints ratio & our overall perception. Here's what he found:
1:1 1 Compliment: 1 Complaint Perception: Negative
2:1 2 Compliments: 1 Complaint Perception: Neutral
3:1 3 Compliments: 1 Complaint Perception: Positive
1 Compliment: 1 Complaint: This is pretty clear. We hear one good thing & one bad thing & we give more weight to the bad leaving us with an overall feeling of negativity. You like my new policy revisions, but wait, what was that you said about my driving?
2 Compliments: 1 Complaint: the negative still gets double the weight, so now we're finally at neutral.
Compliments: 1 Complaint: At this point, your staff (spouse, child, SO) will feel like you are fair & balanced. You see the good they do & acknowledge it regularly. Therefore, when you do have to bring up something that might need improvement, they're more open & less defensive because they've been fed a steady diet of positives.
The Emotional Bank Account: Let's look at this another way: some experts like Healthcare guru, Quint Studer, refer to this as the "emotional bank account" that we all carry around with us. As a leader, you are constantly making deposits & withdrawals from the emotional banks accounts of your staff. Every time you compliment them, it's a deposit. Every time you tell them about opportunities for improvement, it's a withdrawal. You've got to make enough deposits, so that a necessary withdrawal (which cost more than a deposit) will not deplete & overdraw the emotional account leaving a person bitter & defensive.
3. Have Fun@Work!
As already noted, staff send most of their waking hours & most of their life devoted to work. It only makes sense, then, that if they're not happy with their job, they're probably not too happy with their life. Work is often part of our identity and a major part of our social sphere. Therefore, adding in life enriching components of fun & joy at work will make it very difficult for staff to even think about looking for work elsewhere. So, what's fun? It depends on your peeps. Ask them! Leaders should look for ways to have fun with their staff rather than arranging for fun & not participating. Themed meals & events can be lots of fun. Contests between departments can bring teams together. (We'll talk about fun@work in more detail in in future blogs). This is key: whatever you do, take tons of pictures & post the heck out of them for all to see. The more staff see the documentation of their fun, the more they can relieve the memories, & the more they'll look forward to future fun. Engagement is not a program. It's an on-going focus on the emotional needs of your staff. We've talked about 3 tools that are "easy"; however they do take a commitment & a change in behavior by the leader. By implementing these tools you will tap into to those "other" aspects of work that staff so desperately want for the world of work: respect, trust, & relationship.
GeGe Beall, FACHE, SPHR, SHRM-SCP is owner of Engaged@Work, a Human Resources & Organizational Development consulting firm that specializes in Speaking, Training, & Workshop Facilitation; Leadership Development; Staff Engagement: Emotional Intelligence; & Fun@Work!
Email: gege@engagedatwork.life
