Employee Engagement – Making Employees Care

Your business might be a SME or a F500, but whatever size, making your employees care is a hot topic. You know that the very best companies are thriving because they are working towards a goal. Like a hot knife through butter,  the best leaders are taking a driven team to dizzying heights of success, or at least this is the narrative you’re being told. Whether you’re listing to podcasts about hustle, and silicon valley, or tech start-ups, you’re imagining that your business needs to have the right people to help you reach your goals.

This is where you start to look at ways to push your employees, to stretch and challenge them. You might see long hours as a sign of commitment, of the proclamation that you haven’t had a lunch break for a decade as a badge of honour.

Wanting to create an environment of bright minds, working tirelessly to reach riches is a fallacy for many businesses.

You might not have a start-up culture. You might have poor leaders, rubbish training plans, a company that is trying to run before it can walk. And at the heart of that – employees that seem not to care.

Asides from shouting ‘CARE MORE!’ in their faces, how can you get them working at their best?

1. Make it a cause they can believe in.

You don’t have to be saving the world, but you should absolutely have a goal that feels tangible and makes sense to everyone in the business at a ‘doing level’.  Why does it matter if they file that document quicker than yesterday? Why do clean offices matter? Why should they smile when they dial? Explain everything.

2. Don’t forget how important the leader is

It’s not cool to be the kind of boss everyone despises. Sure, you have a thick skin and you can handle it, but your retention rate will be plummeting like bad stock. Why would they care about lining your pockets when you only visibly care about squeezing every last piece of goodness from them?  At the same time, a weak leader is as good as no leader at all. A business without leadership is a sailboat meandering in the ocean with no wind – static.

3. Connect one on one

For all the talk of hustle and grind and how to make you business successful, you are nothing without people whether you have a team of 2 or a team of 2000. You have to delegate, yes, but you need to stay in touch with the emotional temperature of your business and you employees. How is their health? What about their families? What are their struggles? What do they want? What really annoys them, every day? Disconnect too much and focus on the steering of the ship at the expense of understanding the people who put the fuel in the engine and you can really lose traction quickly.

What are your tips for making employees give a monkeys?

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