The best companies are made up of employees who are both successful and committed. Motivated and engaged employees can be found in a company that promotes productivity, creativity, and innovation through its culture and leadership. Creating a culture that supports and promotes employee engagement requires an understanding of the connection between employee attitudes and performance as well as a leadership team that is accountable for building and strengthening that relationship.
To create this type of culture, it’s critical that the leadership team has the tools to understand how to make employees feel valued and supported. These tools go beyond competitive compensation and benefits. Trends indicate high performing organizations are ensuring their employees understand how they contribute to the company’s goals, feel relevant, have challenging assignments, and have their voice heard.
Here a few thoughts to outline these concepts:
Communication
Share as much information on company performance as can be shared, while demonstrating that the senior leadership is managing change and remaining aligned with the company’s values. This communication must cascade in a manner that ensures employees clearly understand the company’s goals, departmental goals, and their individual goals. An employee’s expected outcomes and the connection to the company’s success must also be clear. After establishing the connection, high performing organizations focus on output, providing employees a high degree of freedom over how and when work gets done. This level of freedom typically results in higher output, innovative methodologies and processes, and new products.
Relevancy and Challenging Assignments
Today’s workforce is seeking out opportunities to invest in themselves. They are looking for ways to learn, enhance their skills, and participate in new ways that allow them to put their knowledge into practice. Valuing and promoting talent provides employees with opportunities to exercise imagination, ingenuity, and creativity, ultimately resulting in exciting, stimulating, and challenging work. Work of this nature fuels employee enthusiasm and encourages employees to become more entrepreneurial.
Voice
High performing companies provide forums and platforms that provide employees with a voice. And not only do they have a voice, but their voice is clearly heard as demonstrated by change and actions. Channels that give employees a voice include such things as immediate and direct management feedback, hosted employee forums, surveys, cross-functional teams, suggestion programs, and project teams. These types of forums emphasize the value the company places on the diversity of thought and inclusive, open-candid communication. They provide the leadership to continually assess attitudes and performance. Ensuring all voices are heard results in inclusion, providing input that is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population, and also allows employees to influence organizational change.
Leadership and culture are the drivers of a successful formula that motivates employees, ultimately allowing the organization and employees to grow together. Clear direction, frequent communication, and feelings of relevancy, challenging work, and a voice that is heard keep people engaged. Looking for more ways to keep your team motivated? Contact Us.
