Don't take your employee relationship for granted

Like any good partnership, you need to keep working at it or it may risk withering up and dying. If people do not continue to receive your interest they might get the eye of someone else whose shows a real interest in them, become attracted by another offer and leave the company.

We are all increasingly busy. Managers become too busy and do not invest the time to constantly check in and get to know and appreciate people at all levels in the business. What sort of message does this send? Do you really care about the people you work with? Do you know what motivates them? Do you make enough time to get to know them outside their working life?

It's not what you know, it's who you know
Relationships make the world go around - as well as your organisation. If you have a good connection with people they will be more likely to:

• Collaborate and provide helpful resources (to increase productivity)
• Listen and want to help the organisation succeed (improved performance)
• Comfortably share with you feelings of disengagement which you may then be able to reverse (improve profitability)

Consider this:

• Do you create ways to get employees together at least four times a year and talk about things apart from work?
• Does almost everyone at work have a best friend here?
• Do you know what your people's top interests are outside work?

Engagement Driver 4: Opportunity

A culture of constant learning and development opportunities is created where people feel positive about their future career prospects

Engagement is increased when people have a positive expectation about their career opportunities within a business. In most organisations fewer than half of their people have a positive perception around their progressive career opportunities, whereas in best practice businesses, around 70 per cent of employees are hopeful about their future prospects within the business.

What if you don't train people - and they stay?
Focus on enhancing employees' strengths more than trying to improve weaknesses. Help your people identify their core skills (strengths) and work with them to continually develop and nurture them, then watch engagement increase.

Get clarity on what people want. Consider using a career development tool to fast track the process. Ask your people what opportunities and challenges they seek. Brainstorm job enriching ideas, even discuss openings with other managers to match any opportunities.

Where possible, recruit from within to reinforce the culture of opportunity and progress. Then make sure you tell everyone possible about it.

Grow or perish
Developing your people should be a never-ending educational and collaborative cycle. There are always innovations, new technologies and smarter ways of doing things popping up in our increasingly busy business worlds, so we need to keep our people ahead of the game, or find that:

• People are not being challenged and become stale and disengaged, or
• Our business stagnates because its employees are not invigorated by new knowledge and skills

Do your people feel:

• Optimistic and hopeful about their future career opportunities?
• A real effort is made to promote people by merit from within the organization?
• They have had at least one training opportunity to learn and grow in the last 12 months?

Do you ever get frustrated by the feeling that you train and develop your key people, simply in readiness for your competitors to poach them?

We've heard it all before, "I left for a better opportunity". The research shows that more than any other single factor, people stay engaged because of opportunities to learn and be challenged. Organisations need to be opportunist and help create the right opportunities for the right people at the right time so that people are engaged enough to stay another month, another year or another five years.

Keep developing your people, or develop increased turnover, the choice is yours.
People have an innate desire to grow and develop. Almost everyone wants to enhance their strengths and take on new challenges to be the best they can be.

If employees are not being developed and growing then they are not being the best they can be. If they are not being the best they can be, then they are not being as happy as possible and therefore employee engagement can be hugely affected.

Consider this, 41 per cent of employees at organisations with poor training plan to leave within a year, versus 12 per cent of employees at companies with excellent training. (Source: American Society for Training & Development)

What sort of talent development plan do you have for yourself and others?

Growing your biggest asset
In many companies more money is spent on recruiting people than for on-going training and development. What is more important; new people or retaining and developing existing employees? One of the most effective engagement returns on investment is growing and developing your existing people.

Best Employers invest more financial resources and time into developing their people than other companies. Companies in the top quarter of training expenditure per employee per year average 24 per cent higher profit margins than companies that spend less per year. (Source: Susan J. Wells, HR Magazine)

Simply ask!

Don't jump to conclusions about what your people want (that would better engage them) as you will probably come up with the wrong solutions. Understand that everyone is different and invest time in rewarding each person based on their personal interests and motivations. If you do not know what those are, it is your job as a business leader to find out. Crazy I know, but why not ask them? Then see how many of them you can fulfill. But be careful not to over promise.

What are the rewards and benefits that glue each unique individual to the business? Because everyone is different!

It might be:

• Health and fitness initiatives
• Cash bonuses and profit shares
• Professional and personal development
• Family friendly practices
• Gifts and non-cash bonuses
• Supported flexibility policies
• Inspirational leadership
• Responsibility and challenge
• Business brand status
• Environment and proximity to home
• Career progression opportunities
• Training and development programs

Maintain a passionate fire within your people, not under them.

Possible actions:

• Ask your people what would really motivate them as far as rewards and benefits
• Have managers interview their people every six months to review personal needs
• Make employee engagement a measurable performance indicator for managers
• One of the most powerful rewards is autonomy and choice, both in work and reward options
• If providing incentives, blend a mix of short-term and long-term rewards
• If you can't pay enough money, give something else
• Never forget the power of praise, recognition and appreciation
• Encourage staff to do their own personal cashflow to take more financial control
• Keep talking and understanding your people, the quest is endless

The New Spelling for Engagement is T.I.M.E
Leaders become too busy and do not invest the time to constantly coach, get to know, review, appreciate and assist their employees, both in work and life. What sort of message does this send to your people?

Invest and make time for your people.
Do you really know what motivates your people? Do employees feel respected enough if you do not make enough time to get to know them? Managers at Best Employers are more generous with their time.

How engaging is money?

Many still believe that pay is the primary reason employees leave their jobs. This is a common misconception that mainly comes from the fact that when people do leave, they usually go to a higher-paid position. In exit interviews it is easier to identify that reasons for leaving are for more money or career opportunities. However, many staff on big salaries are unhappy, while staff earning a lot less can be very happy and engaged.

Financial packages can attract employees to a role, but not sustain their engagement. Interestingly, 89% of managers believe that employees leave for more money, whereas 88% of employees really leave for reasons other than money. In reality only 12 per cent of employees do leave due to financial reasons, mostly because they need to pay the extra bills. (Source: Saratoga Institute Research).

The truth is, employee engagement is determined far more by management practices than any other. "More than 70,000 exit interviews have proved that the principal reason people leave a company voluntarily is the behavior of their supervisors." (Source: Jac Fitz-Enz, The ROI of Human Capital)

Talented people want to be measured and rewarded for their successes
Many other reasons employees leave are because they feel devalued by the fact that pay is not linked to performance, or they have no idea how pay rises are determined. These reasons have more to do with management than just the size of the paycheck.

Most employees just want to be remunerated fairly compared to others in a similar field and situation. Access some pay scales to make sure you are paying market standards at least.

But more than that, employees in best practice organisations feel that:

• They are paid fairly for their contribution to the organisation's success
• Their performance has an impact on their pay
• They share in the financial success of the business

Remember this mantra:
What is important gets measured
What gets measured gets done
What gets done gets rewarded and
What gets rewarded is important

Purpose is an employees emotional salary

Individuals find it difficult to sustain their energy and be engaged when they feel their job has no real purpose beyond making money for someone else. When employees are not clear about their values and are unsure about how they serve the big picture, it can create feelings of frustration, insecurity, loss of purpose and meaning and thereby create disengagement. Employees begin to question whether they are succeeding or failing in their role. As a result, they start to question the organisation and become critical and uncommitted.

"93 per cent of engaged employees feel that the business has purpose."

(Source: Chart Your Course Workforce Retention Survey)
In 90 per cent of cases people in Best Employer companies are clear about the purpose and the common benefits. In other companies, only 75 per cent of the people in the company have a clear vision that they can support.

It is therefore up the CEO and managers to help inspire and reinforce an employee's sense of purpose and meaning, or risk losing them. You may like to ask yourself these sort of questions:

• Is the purpose of the organisation clearly articulated and reinforced?
• Are our employees clear on the big picture of the business and see how they meaningfully fit into it?
• Do our people feel like they work for a great organisation that contributes to the greater good of the community and is socially responsible?

Consider
1. Communicating and telling the company's story:

• Reinforce community success stories
• Make sure everyone understands the ultimate purpose and greater good of the business
• Create a more meaningful purpose for each team and person
• Highlight any support that the company has made to a charity or the environment
• Allow people to participant in volunteer activities outside work

2. Being the change you want to see:

• Demonstrate the values of the business by doing value-driven activities every day
• If you are trying to instil work life balance, be seen going home at a respectable time
• Managers don't just say that people are important, they demonstrate it in the things they do

3. Reinforcing why an individual's work is significant and how it fits into the bigger picture:

• Give positive feedback based on the values and purpose of the business
• Reinforce the purpose in the recruiting process

4. Getting individuals clear on what would make their work more meaningful:

• Create a culture of appreciation and gratitude throughout the business
• Provide career development tools
• Do personal reviews at least twice a year
• Help individuals establish a five-year vision
• Consider days off to do pro bono work for a cause
• If not much can be improved at work, focus on meaningful outside interests

Continually breaking in new employees is no way for your company to continue being successful

Unfortunately, 4 per cent of people leave after the first day and after six months engagement drops on average by 62 per cent (Source: Gallup). The good news is at least 60 per cent of premature turnover can be avoided.

Very early on, employees will know if the employer promises are being kept and their expectations are being fulfilled. Any omissions or lack of information about the reality of the new role can lead to mistrust and employee disengagement and result in people leaving prematurely. Constant recruiting is a costly exercise in terms of money and time.

Poor recruitment processes are commonly the villain when:

• Expectations are not met between the employee and organisation if the job is oversold by the recruiter
• The wrong person is hired and there is not a suitable match
• There is a flawed induction process where the new employee's sense of belonging is stagnated

Consider:

• Resisting the temptation to fill the vacant role with someone who may leave in 6 months anyway if the match is not right
• Doing new-recruit career development programs before employees start fully with the company
• Audit your employment process and compare the professionalism of external recruiters
• Be totally honest about the role and organisational experience (e.g. "A promotion won't be considered for the first 12 months." Or, "You have to work hard to get bonuses.")
• Reviewing your induction processes

Getting rid of the dead wood?

Here is a question from a reader of a recent "Engaging People" newsletter about the new self-driven employee engagement philosophy.

Question: Doesn't giving employees more control of their work, life and finances mean they get greater personal awareness and perhaps identify they should leave the organisation, therefore increasing turnover?

In some cases yes, and in most cases this is a good thing. Those that leave the organisation were those that were going to leave anyway. As such, this process can be likened to shaking the tree of its dead wood as, in most cases these people are the already disengaged "complacent cows" and "corporate cancer" that can be extremely unmotivating to the engaged "eager beavers".

One recent legal client we ran a program for was going to retrench 15% of their workforce. Two weeks after one of our face-to-face programs four people resigned. These four were all going to be retrenched anyway, thus saving the company over $200,000 in pay outs. The program however gave the leaving employees more autonomy in the decisions they were making. This also applied to the remaining employees, giving them more control over areas that they could take more responsibility in for improving their own work, life, finances and balance.

With the self-driven employee engagement approach and by using scalable systems and tools it can only create a sustainable win-win culture were everyone was a winner.