Episode 30 How to Get Employees to Engage

Employee Performance 

How do you get your employees to engage? Overall getting workers to do the things you know they need to do to get your business to succeed, is a common universal issue for just about every business.  

When talking to owners and operators, it appears this is a struggle for everyone at some level. My interpretation is that this struggle exists because we’ve got it backwards.  

As leaders and managers, we have the process backwards. After hiring, we expect first for an employee to behave and work as needed, then we expect that employee to develop a liking to the company and their work, so that finally that person will grow into a sense of belonging to the company.  

Unfortunately, that’s not how the human brain works. If we’re to understand how to get our team members to positively engage to support our business goals, then we need to reverse that process and first create a sense of belonging to our workers.  

This will then allow you to exhibit to them why they should believe in you as a leader, and your business. Once those fundamental aspects are established, then you can expect to see top level performance. Too often we immediately expect high level behavior without the necessary ingredients to create and support those employees.  

Welcome to the Family 

The old attitude of bringing an employee into your inner circle only after they’ve proven to be a profitable asset to your business, is looking at the process in the wrong order. More workers can perform better if they have the correct environment to thrive professionally.  

This begins even before a new hire’s first day. Maybe even during the hiring process, you should rethink your vocabulary and start using phrases like welcome to the team or family. Your employees should feel like they have a place to belong, before they walk into the office.  

Support this positive environment by encouraging social activity and team building activities. This can be as simple as e-mails or handwritten notes to prove to them that they belong. Show that it is your choice to serve them.  

Your workers will start to believe in you as a leader. Once that happens, they’ll start to understand why you started the business in the first place. This will help your team believe in themselves, in your company’s performance, and the positive result of your business endeavors.  

Employees that feel this way, will start to perform better, listen better, and quickly grow past any of your previously established expectations.  

We have someone on my team, Sam, who recently got a promotion. Sam is exceptionally gifted at helping people feel like they belong. I believe so much in this process of making my team members feel like they belong, so I created a new position just for Sam— Executive of Belonging.  

In that role, Sam’s job is to evaluate everyone on the team, as well as our customer base, to make sure that everyone feels that they’re a part of this Stewardship family.  

This Week’s Take Away 

Make someone on your staff feel like they belong. As you’ve been reading, and learning how reverse engineering employee loyalty can increase worker performance by helping your team feel that they belong, you might have had someone in mind… one of your employees that you know has been down, or having difficulty getting to the next step in their growth.  

Or maybe you have a new employee that’s come along, but not fully acclimated or on-boarded socially with the rest of the team.  

Take the effort to show them that they belong in your company family.