Senior Leaders Hold The Key To Outstanding Employee Engagement

Managers Do the Heavy Lifting When It Comes to Engaging Employees

While your role as a senior leader is critical, you won’t move the needle on employee engagement without your management team. That’s because managers are responsible for 70% of the variability in employee engagement rates.

To fully engage employees, successful managers need to be able to:

• Develop outstanding interpersonal relationships,
• Engage in authentic conversations and
• Recognize unique talents and reward achievements.

Are your managers doing all of those things effectively?
If not, what can YOU do about it?

Three Ways Leaders Pave the Way for Higher Employee Engagement

Managers are on the front lines when it comes to engaging employees. But senior leaders are the key to making it happen.

The best leaders enable their managers by creating an environment that allows employee engagement to flourish. That involves:
1. Making employee engagement a strategic priority
2. Ensuring managers have the support and training they need
3. Engaging managers, holding them accountable and rewarding them for employee engagement

1. Make Employee Engagement A Strategic Priority
Employee engagement rates are stagnant. Our research shows that only 30% of employees are fully engaged. In part, this is because leadership often fails to make employee engagement a genuine priority.

Deloitte reports that85% of company leaders say employee engagement is an important strategic priority, but our research shows that just 31% of front-line managers and employees see evidence of that in their organizations.That’s a huge disconnect.

Even more problematic, if managers aren’t seeing that emphasis from leaders, it has a ripple effect.

Our survey found that teams whose managers make employee engagement a daily priority are almost three times more engaged than teams whose managers do not. And 52% of managers we surveyed said they’re likely to make employee engagement a daily priority if they’re convinced their organization also makes it a priority. But if the organization doesn’t, a mere 14% of managers make the commitment.

Be honest: Do your managers think your leaders are truly prioritizing employee engagement?

If not, first, check your leadership team’s beliefs. Leadership needs to see employee engagement as a competitive advantage, a strategic point of differentiation. They need to embrace employee engagement as the way to reach the organization’s goals. Only then will they own it and invest in it.

Second, establish a culture of engagement throughout the organization, starting at the executive level. Make employee engagement one of the organization’s strategic priorities, and make sure you treat it like a strategic priority, with all that entails, including objectives, plans, resources, timelines and how it will be measured. Creating a culture of engagement starts with the CEO. Including it as a KRA for leaders at all levels speaks volumes.

Third, sell employee engagement to your front-line managers. Make them investors, too. After all, they’re the ones who do the day-in-day-out work of engaging employees. They carry the load. They need to understand what’s at stake and what’s in it for them.

2. Ensure Managers Have the Support and Training They Need
Half of the managers we surveyed said they’re confident they know how to engage their employees, and 36% said their organizations provide effective training. But is that good enough?

The evidence suggests it isn’t: Only about 30% of U.S. employees are fully engaged, according to research by both Dale Carnegie Training and Gallup—and that percentage has barely moved since it was first measured at the turn of the century.

But 48% of managers are likely to make employee engagement a daily priority when their organization provides effective training. And 42% of managers are likely to make engagement a priority if they believe their organization supports them in that effort. In both instances, organizations enjoy a threefold increase in managers’ likelihood of engaging employees when the organization does its part to facilitate it.

But what training matters? What counts as support?

We define employee engagement as an employee’s emotional and psychological commitment to the organization. Gaining that commitment requires managers to build employee trust, create psychologically safe working environments, demonstrate respect and communicate sincere appreciation. In a nutshell, managers need to develop great interpersonal skills. If those aren’t high on your list of required manager competencies, you need to prioritize them, just as companies like Google and Microsoft have done.

What else can leaders do?

Look around. Do some informal research. Ask your managers what they need. See what barriers you can remove and what distractions you can eliminate. What policies and processes can you align to better support their engagement efforts? Ask, listen and then make it happen.

3. Engage Middle Managers and Hold Them Accountable
Lots of leaders talk the talk, but fail to walk the walk.

If you’re not thinking about, planning for and actively working to engage your managers every day, not only are you missing the opportunity to show them how it’s done, you’re also unintentionally de-prioritizing employee engagement for your management team.

Our research shows that only 34% of managers think their organizations make an effort to engage them as employees, and 44% don’t expect their supervisors to notice or care about their efforts to engage employees. If it isn’t part of how they’re being managed, coached and evaluated, then you can hardly blame them for not prioritizing it themselves.

In fact, engagement has a trickle-down effect in organizations. When leaders engage managers, managers are more effective at engaging employees. That’s why senior leaders must take the responsibility.

We also found that managers who believe their supervisors make an effort to engage them are three times more likely to make employee engagement a daily priority themselves. And for managers who make employee engagement a daily priority? Nearly six in ten lead teams who are likewise fully engaged.

Make employee engagement a TOP PRIORITY in your organization. If you need help or want to learn more, check out our website to discover our leadership and interpersonal training programs.