Written. Emails are easy. Physical mails are worth more. Mail a card.
Appreciation: Clearly express your gratitude. Mentioning the specific action or effort you’re thankful for shows you’re attentive and value their hard work. This aligns with your ethos on recognizing individual contributions to collective success.
Personalization: Tailor the message to the individual, noting how their unique skills or qualities contributed to the achievement. This reflects your belief in the importance of personal development and individual strengths in achieving business goals.
Impact: Highlight the positive impact of their actions on the project, team, or company goals. This echoes your emphasis on results-driven approaches and the importance of each contribution to the broader mission of the firm.
Forward-looking statement: Include a note of encouragement or excitement for future projects or the continuation of their excellent work. It mirrors your forward-thinking attitude and the value you place on growth and continuous improvement.
When an organization has high engagement, employees are giving extra discretionary effort in their jobs, staying, and referring prospective employees and customers. Also, organizations with high engagement are more profitable and have more productive and less absent employees.
We discuss the core parts of engagement, including:
• Alignment with goals • Teamwork • Co-worker trust • Manager effectiveness and trust in senior leaders • Job satisfaction • Feeling valued • Benefits and pay
Throughout the conversation, there are specific, actionable ways for leaders to increase engagement.
For employees to be happy and engaged, there are “spheres” of job satisfaction. Free beer doesn’t matter if your work is mundane and your manager’s a moron. When addressing engagement, start from the inside and work outward
At Intertech, we improve communication in the leadership team through personality cheat sheets, which are personality profiles that remind us who hates long-winded descriptions and who struggles to make a decision that involves something unpleasant. This is to keep us from driving each other crazy in those little annoying everyday ways that creep up when people work closely together for a long time. The cheat sheets are the result of a personality inventory similar to a Myers–Briggs test. I highly recommend it for any group of partners or managers who work closely together.
Also, we are intentional about building strong, trusting relationships among the leadership team. Pre-COVID, a weekly lunch at a local restaurant took us away from the daily press of business and helped us reconnect on a more fundamental level.
