How To Engage Employees In The Workplace
If you’re looking for ways to engage your employees in the workplace then today is the day. We’re here with Sydney Jacques. She’s definitely the expert in this arena. Welcome to Hero TV.
Hey everybody its Sydney Jacques and I’m so excited today to share with you one of my favorite topics is how to engage employees in the workplace. So, as you probably know, we do a lot of training and a lot of it’s for construction teams. And I always like to ask this question, do you remember how you felt when you’re engaged to be married? Now you might be surprised to know that the women in the room will typically give me different answers than the men in the room. But still, go along with me. Do you remember what it was like when you’re engaged to be married? What did you feel like? were you excited hopefully? were you looking forward to it? something positive? As we talked about trying to influence our employees so that they’ll be engaged in the workplace, this is what we’re looking for. We’re looking for somebody who is emotionally committed just like when I was engaged to be married to my husband. Emotionally committed to show up and be married to him on a certain date. We are asking our employees to be emotionally committed to show up to work at a certain time to do a certain thing. So, let’s talk about those engaged employees. How are we going to get there? what do we do? Gallup has done a ton of research on this and actually I think the statistics are kind of depressing. In the Gallup, the most recent Gallup survey that I could find, they estimate that only thirty percent of our employees are truly engaged in an average day at work.
They say that fifty percent are disengaged. So when I ask people, what do you think that means? they usually say, “well they’re on their Facebook, on their Twitter, doing other things besides their work”. But then, there’s another statistic that goes with it and that is that twenty percent are actively disengaged. So not only just not engaged and not really into it, but actively disengaged which in my mind means they’re hurting the company. Now, the first thing that comes in my mind when I think of that is, I have teenagers. My teenagers have a lot of friends that work at fast-food restaurants. It is appalling to me how many times their friends will say, “hey, if you come tonight while I’m working and the managers not there, I can get you free food” And I have to use my influence model to influence my kids to say, that’s not our idea. That’s not our values. That’s not the way that we think. Because that’s not being honest. They don’t have permission to give away the food from their restaurant. So they’re actively disengaged and actually hurting their company. But what about that big section in the middle? what about this section of 50% of our employees that are not currently engaged in the workforce. What are we going to do? Let me help you find some solutions. So as we move into, what are the solution?s how do we do this? There is some key research from Gallup and I say, if they’ve already done the research why not use it to our advantage? So Gallup has come up with 12 elements of engagement. Now these are things that they’ve identified that have proven to be able to help employees be more engaged. So I’m going to list these for you because one of the exercises that I do and I when I work with organizations, is that we take these 12 things and then we let the employees tell us, which of these are most important? which would be more motivating to me as an individual? So I want to just share them with you. Number one, is I know what is expected of me. Again, that goes back to clarity builds trust. Do our employees really know what’s expected of them? Number two, I have what I need as far as materials and equipment to do my work and to do it right. Are we asking those questions? Number three, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. To me, that sounds like maybe that’s kind of an ideal situation? But why not work towards that? Do you know what your employees do best? Number four, in the last week, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
Alright, I don’t know if you watch the video we did about the Millennials but if you have Millennials in your workforce, they want praise and recognition. If that’s not our standard, we need to learn how to do it. We can talk to them, we can email them, we can write them a thank-you note, we even have one client that we work with and on their time card system it actually comes with an option to be able to send somebody a thank-you note when they’re feeling after they turn in their time card to tell them what you appreciated that week. So number five, is my supervisor cares about me as a person. Number six, is I have a development plan in place. That goes back to, can they see a future with your company? Number seven, my opinion seems to count. Are you creating a culture where people know it’s safe to share their opinion? to share their ideas? Number eight, is I know our mission and I know how my job fits into that and it’s an important part of the mission. Number nine, my fellow employees are committed to quality work. So in order for people to be engaged, if the people around them they’re in fellow employees are engaged in quality work, it’s more likely that they will be engaged themselves. Number ten, I have a really great friend at work. Something that we probably don’t think about but it’s important. Things like, “question of the day” help us find out what do we have in common? and how can we become better friends at work? Number eleven, in the last six months someone has talked to me about my progress. Again, they want a future with the company. They want to know that somebody’s talking to them, understanding them, knowing the path that they’re on. And number 12, in the last year I’ve had opportunities at work to learn and to grow. So I know that was a lot of information, but really these things are at the core of employee engagement. So we will have these accessible to you in the link below. I hope that you will think about these and then like I say, take these and go to your ploys and have them rank them. Have them tell you, what are the three or four most important things to them. Is it to have a best friend at work? or maybe they really don’t have the equipment and the materials that they need to do a really good job.
Maybe they haven’t had an opportunity to be able to talk about their progress in the path that they can move on to be able to move up in your company. But if you don’t ask the question you don’t know what’s most important to them. One of my favorite exercises to do when we work with organizations on employee engagement, goes back to my model of the upper arrow. And just a real quick overview, the model is such that every company has to be able to define the quality of their product and services. If you don’t have quality product and service, you will not stay in business. But once you have that, and once you deliver that consistently to your clients, to your customers, then you have to figure out how do I differentiate myself? What’s going to set me apart? And that’s where what I call the upper arrow comes in. What is the differentiator? For me, in my business, it was baking chocolate-chip cookies. Because no other engineers were doing that. Well, when we work with organizations and work on employee engagement, we take that same model and we sit down with employees and we say, “okay, let’s take time to define what are the product and services that you provide?” You would be amazed how many times people aren’t really sure. Well I do this and I do that and I go to meetings and… help them to get really clear on what products and services do they provide, who are the customers that they provide that to. That’s the part of the diagram that has to be done before you can even think about going to the upper arrow. So we start with that and we help people get in a place where they’re really, really clear about, this is my job, these are my responsibilities, this is how I provide quality products and services to our clients. Maybe they’re internal customers that they provide to. After that, then we talk about the upper arrow. We talk about ways that we can individually, utilize an upper arrow that will help the company and really add value and at the same time, I’m becoming more engaged as an employee. One of my favorite examples is an organization that we are working with and the office manager was really into fitness. She’s run over 40 marathons, and she exercises, and she’s really into fitness. And as we’re having this discussion about what’s an upper arrow that you could provide to add value to the company, she said, “you know what? we’ve never had an employee wellness program. I think it would be really fun to do something in the company where we’re encouraging wellness among everybody”. So they said. “go ahead, let’s do that. what does that look like?”. They gave her a budget, and they just let her go after it. Well, she went to work, she ordered some pedometers, and they were even engraved with the name of the company on him and then her budget was such that she could get them for everyone and their families not just the employees. So they had pedometers for everyone. They started a weekly check-in where they would record their number of steps that they’re getting. And they had little contest, they split the families into groups and had little contests for healthy habits which included not just the walking or running but also water, nutrition, sleep. And then they had a big celebration. So this is a way that she absolutely added value to the company through her upper arrow, but do you think she was more excited to come to work? I promise you she was. It was something that she owned. Something she was empowered to do, something that, she, she just took that over. So, it’s a total win-win because the company had more value, they had more healthy, and excited employees. And at the same time, this office manager was much more passionate, much more engaged, in what she was doing. Because this is something that she loved. So as we sit with teams, this is what we do, is we try to help them identify what’s an upper arrow? So use the model of the for arrow and help every employee figure out what are the quality product and service that I provide? who do I provide them to? and then how can I go above and beyond and really implement an upper arrow that adds value to the company and will help me be even more engaged as an employee.
I certainly hope you enjoyed this episode of hero TV and thanks as always to Sydney for sharing all this great info. Put a lot of details down in the description below. Be sure to subscribe because we have daily episodes. And remember to live on purpose, make a difference, and be the hero.