My Interview on Employee Engagement with Dave Osh of CEOpeek

My thanks to Dave Osh with CEOpeek for discussing employee engagement and create a great place to work.

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.

The Spheres of Job Satisfaction

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

A Communication Cheat Sheet to Help Leadership Understand One Another

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.

Here’s ours (names changed to protect the innocent) of a communication cheat sheet.

Strategic Communication

When communicating with anyone… employees, customers, friends, or family here are some guidelines to make communication effective.

First, when communicating something that could be perceived either way, do it face-to-face:

When communicating bad news:

  1. Collect all the information to have one conversation vs. a death by 1,000 cuts
  2. Give your customer, employee, partner an option… even if it’s equally disagreeable, they’ll feel better because they had a choice