Tip#1: Employee Engagement isn’t something that is to be done and finished, it is a continuous living process.
Tip#2: Employee Engagement is treating people as individuals, not as ‘units of labour’ or ‘human resources’, and making a human connection.
Tip#3: Good managers engage people by delivering a sense of personal fulfilment; everyone feels they are doing something valued and worth doing.
Tip#4: Bad managers use their hierarchical authority to deliver threats and punishments to deter bad performance. This leads to high turnover of staff and minimal acceptable performance.
Tip#5: Good managers who have that human connection with their people, their ‘family’, are constantly astounded by what their people achieve. Performance is astonishingly high.
Tip#6: People have a business role and a domestic role. The one affects the other always. You de-motivate someone by not recognising that difficult personal circumstances affect work performance.
Tip#7: Recognise individual aspirations and talents, create a ‘fulfilment value chain’ for the individual and you have one incredibly motivated employee who has your best interests at heart.
Tip#8: Always value the human being, there is a divine spark in us all. When performance needs managing talk about the behaviour in work, as the employer that is all you rent.
Tip#9: Don’t be reluctant to discuss poor performance. If the individual’s contribution is important (see Tip3) then they’re not delivering is important too.
Tip#10: Poor performance is always the fault of poor training, poor resources, poor communication so always the manager’s fault. So, apologise and seek to understand what went wrong and fill in the missing elements. After the fourth of three attempts to make things better, then you talk about perhaps the individual should seek more relevant opportunities for their skills.
Stephen Walker – working on making people want to work since 1978. We used to call it morale, now it’s employee engagement.