Unlock the power of your employees to drive success

Every CEO has a vision; the challenge is to enable and inspire employees to carry out this vision.  To achieve the transformation that will deliver a truly engaged workforce requires employees to become more intrinsic to the business strategy.

A key consideration is how to influence the underlying drivers for employee engagement? Of course, employee engagement is nothing new but the type of engagement that can be truly transformational is all too uncommon. Here are five tips to help you improve employee engagement and drive success.

1. Empower employees to deliver the business strategy

To realise empowerment that delivers on values, beyond giving employees the tools and knowledge they need to make and act upon their own decisions:

• Align leadership; provide autonomy to identify the actions required to build trust and credibility
• Define the desired behaviours that are needed for the organisation to achieve business success
• Communicate the values and behaviours to ensure employee buy-in
• Establish built-in accountability to ensure that each employee fulfils their commitments
• Build a favourable environment that empowers people so that both leadership and employees share in the benefits
• Reinforce the vision and values and associated behaviours through storytellin
•  Recognise and reward success

2. Communicate and engage effectively to live the values

The greater responsibility lies with the CEO and management to engage with their people; and the ownership of any engagement program should be shared by the architects of the business strategy. Two-way communication between management and employees is key to a successful journey of employee engagement. Not only does it build trust between management and employees but it forms the basis for personable engagement, emotional attachment, involvement and commitment by all parties.

3. Align the organisation

Research demonstrates that individuals whose personal values are aligned with their employer’s culture are more engaged and are more likely to stay longer in the role and become organisational advocates or ambassadors.

The goal is for employees to understand the vision and values and how their role links to the business’ goals. Successful organisations instil belief and behaviour in a targeted, personalised and purposeful way where all programs, policies and operations are aligned. Central to delivering exceptional customer experiences, key behaviours have to be identified and each area of the organisation has to understand its role in realising the vision to achieve success.

4. Measure and act on feedback

A common failing with many organisations is not understanding the culture as their employees see it. Companies who actively engage employees can measure their competitive edge in the form of increased profitability, productivity and customer loyalty as well as decreased employee turnover, safety incidents, and absenteeism.

Insights gained from measuring employee engagement can drive business improvement strategies and activities significantly:

• Use key metrics that reflect and reinforce the company’s values and vision
• Identify the factors driving engagement and measure the effectiveness of any improvement strategies implemented
• Track the performance and share successes
• Monitor and track sentiment about your organisation internally and externally to gain key insights about your program or company
• Act on the feedback to implement or drive change

5. Report to all employees in a way that matters

While program metrics of success can be focused on top level executive requirements, acknowledging the successes and improvements as well as engaging all employees in a manner that’s relevant to their jobs will encourage active participation in the journey. When working together towards a common goal, the collective force of engaged employees can bring companies to new levels of innovation, growth, and bottom-line results.