When looking to improve job satisfaction, we want to start from the inside sphere and work our way out… start with a challenging job and a healthy relationship with a person’s direct manager.
From first to last, below are the areas needed to create a job that’s fulfilling:
Look for opportunities to make a job more than a job:
In an engagement survey, below are a few of the questions they’d be asked around the trust and effectiveness of managers:
To me, leadership has two main components… first, is how we think
Great leaders take blame for mistakes, give away credit when there’s success, and set an example:
I think Dale Carnegie does a great job of nailing the seven things a leader does…
Here are a couple of questions around coworker trust found on an engagement survey:
To help the leadership team understand how each of us are “wired”, we’ve all taken a personality assessment and created a cheat sheet which identifies the core ways we want to work with one another.
To create an environment of trust, as leaders, we need to let our team members know it’s O.K. to make mistakes. To create trust, we need to know each other as people. To do this, there should be a corporate calendar with scheduled business and social events.
When assessing engagement related to teamwork, below are a couple of questions found on a employee engagement survey:
For employees, there should be clear, objective goals. At Intertech, for performance management, we use Dale Carnegie Key Result Areas (KRAs) but any method that’s forward facing and objective works.
What do great managers have in common? They focus on the employee’s strengths:
Here are a couple of my favorite teamwork quotes:
Engagement starts with hiring.
Finally, look for ways to connect your team with technology. Below are a few favorites:
Last month, I delivered a conference keynote. My talk was on engagement. For the 400+ attendees, I started by sharing what engagement means and finished with the eight areas of engagement and shared specific, actionable ideas to increase engagement.
Employee engagement results in a few major things… employees who advocate and promote your organization, who do more than the job requires, and who stay.
When you see the “Best” or “Great” places to work lists in magazines or newspapers, they are based on engagement. Engagement surveys are measured by:
For an engaging job, this is what employees look for:
For a manager that drives high engagement, they don’t focus on weakness:
Engagement results in more productivity, profit, safety and less absenteeism:
Engagement is not gimmicks or expensive:
