All of your engagement efforts are for nothing if your top leaders aren’t on board with your strategy. Strong leadership has a two-fold value in maintaining excellent employee engagement.
Leaders must be on board with management’s decision to make employee engagement a top business priority. However, many HR leaders find it challenging to demonstrate the value of engagement to management.
The solution to catching the attention of company management is to focus on the ROI of engagement strategies. You need to demonstrate all of the benefits involved with investing in engagement strategies, showing how it affects the bottom line of the company.
Does Your Organization Have the Right Leaders?
A leader’s most important task is taking care of the company’s people. You need to incorporate that same sense of service into your company’s culture to be successful in lifting engagement. Effective leaders have personality traits and behaviors that bring out the best in employees.
It’s important to note that leadership has no bearing on tenure at the company. How long a manager has been with the company has no bearing on their effectiveness in a leadership role.
Companies need to start investing in leadership development as much as they are investing in other areas of the employee experience. When managers don’t have the tools they need to lead correctly, it trickles down to affect the entire team.
Closing the leadership gaps is about equipping managers with the tools, technology, and training they need to enhance the workplace, allowing them to spend more time on motivating and inspiring employees to perform.
Strategies to Strengthen Company Leadership
There are two strategies that you can use to strengthen the leadership in your organization, helping your managers level-up to their commitments
Create a Continuous Feedback Loop
Research on employee-manager relationships shows that communications are the key area that employees feel managers need to work on improving. Managers need to work out a regular schedule for face-to-face meetings with employees in private.
These informal meetings help to strengthen the manager-employee relationship by building trust and rapport between the parties. Managers need to listen to employees’ concerns in these meetings and map out a plan to address these concerns.
Implementing a plan to resolve any issues before the date of the next meeting will help to spur employee engagement with problem-solving.
Implement the Leadership Effectiveness Index
Leaders need to hold themselves accountable for the employee experience by measuring engagement. You can ask your employees a series of questions to get feedback on your progress of becoming a more effective leader in your organization.
The questionnaire should help managers understand employee satisfaction levels and where management needs to improve. These questions need to fall into your regular face-to-face employee meetings, providing you with a guide to measuring your performance of lifting employee engagement levels.
When starting your leadership effectiveness index, it’s critical to remember to create a baseline. By establishing a baseline, you can measure the trend moving forward. By using the benchmark as a measurement, managers can identify potential disengagement triggers, as well as any existing leadership challenges.
