How to improve employee engagement

HR managers, and most management teams, understand the value of strongly engaged employees. It means more productive, more competitive and more resilient organisations. While its importance is easy to acknowledge, making engagement happen is a more complex challenge. Many organisations have not developed managers that know how to effectively grow and sustain employee engagement.

So how do you improve employee engagement and create people who are 'connected and committed' to the business? There's no quick fix; models (in abundance!), incentives, surveys, measurement and other tools may help but they're not what its about. If there's a secret to building employee engagement it's this: "Everything begins and ends with management". Acquiring the leadership skills to improve employee engagement takes time and management effort. Without management focus and commitment it won't happen.

Employee engagement is often undermined by management

A highly productive step in growing employee engagement is to firstly explore what your managers are doing to disengage staff. Management 'mistakes' have a serious negative impact on engagement, and consequently productivity. They cost you money. Poorly handled communication is a good example, such as middle level and front line managers who filter communication coming from senior management rather than boosting it. That is, rather than intensifying or stepping up the signal coming from senior managers, they have a tendency to filter out key messages. This is exacerbated when managers inadvertently promote a 'we/they' environment, in which a wedge is driven between senior management and employees, trivialising or demeaning organisational purpose and objectives. Senior management is a 'rock' that all employees need to believe in. Examples like these of course only hinder your efforts to engage and retain staff!

To address actions by your managers that are disengaging staff, have a serious look at how management errors are manifesting themselves in your organisation. There's a dozen or so that you should be looking for, six of which are discussed in Fortune's 'Why We Fail To Lead Part 1' preview CD....you can request it here.

Develop engaged employees with delegated responsibility

Employee engagement is enhanced when your managers are appropriately developing and delegating responsibility to their staff. Management is essentially a thinking, not a doing job. Be sensitive to how well your managers are actively growing the engagement of their direct reports by structuring the appropriate tasks (and accountabilities), communicating clear expectations, not falling into the trap of being the 'problem solver' and following up by recognising, coaching and counseling performance, both good and bad!

Whilst your managers should always be developing their team, and we don't mean just ensuring they have the right training, empowerment is a great tool for increasing their engagement. When effective managers are providing clear and appropriate scope to act, people feel connected and committed to the company, which is the essence of employee engagement.

Increase employee engagement with 'Leadership In Action'

We've only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building employee engagement. If you're a senior leader, HR manager, line manager, frontline manager, team leader or anyone else committed to growing more engaged and productive employees, you should learn about 'Leadership In Action', Fortune's leadership development program that trains managers how to grow their business by engaging people in making the vision a reality.