Want to Strengthen Employee Engagement? Here is how to become an effective manager

In our previous blog, we looked at strengthening employee engagement by sharing your vision and establishing mutual trust with your employees. Today we’re exploring another key element that’s critical to achieving a fully engaged workforce, and hence a higher performance and productivity.

Effective management throughout the organisation

Most of your employees don’t work with you directly. Their experience of ‘management’ is impacted more by their immediate contact with line managers, and this in its turn influences how they perceive the company as a whole.

It’s therefore vital that your values and your vision for the company are reflected by all managers in their actions and approach. One of the main reasons that people give for leaving an organisation is their direct line managers. Those who stay usually reflect in their performance their manager’s ability to engage and motivate them.

Good managers share with their teams their vision of success and give them regular feedback on whether this vision is being achieved. They treat every employee as an individual, spend time getting to know people, and give team members the space to enhance the job with their own ideas and creativity. They address dysfunctional or negative behaviours in a non-confrontational manner.

Are your managers clear on what you expect them to deliver?

Before you can be sure that your managers are all clear on what you need them to do, you yourself must have a clear vision of your expectations. A good starting point is role modeling and illustrating best practice in your own management, and making sure your managers have the necessary training for effective employee management.

A key factor in your role here is to recognise and reward your managers – not just those who perform well themselves, but also those managers who develop and keep their teams and achieve a high level of group performance.

It’s important to employ those who can effectively motivate and manage people at all levels in your organisation. This applies right across the board, from your front-line team leaders to your senior management team. You may also consider underlining this message with employee surveys, or with upward feedback reports in your managers’ own appraisals.

At the end of the day, it’s not you or your directors who manage most of your employees, so it must be a priority to ensure that everyone in the organisation understands the advantages of employee engagement. If you want everyone to feel engaged and perform to their best ability, it’s a crucial responsibility for all managers to achieve the best they can in team performance.

In our final look at employee engagement, we’ll discuss the perennial challenge of communication, and how it can improve (or undermine) effective employee engagement.

 

All of our consultants have successfully run businesses and our practical approach to supporting our clients enables us to share our real-world experience to positively impact on the performance of your business.

 

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