Stoking the Fire: Helping Employees Engage Part 1

I feel like I’ve read way too many HR articles lately that sound like Chicken Little. You know, “the sky is falling” and “the workforce is falling apart.”

Most list about 922 things that are wrong about the workforce and work. They throw out a lot of pessimistic statistics, but don’t offer many solutions beyond ”leaders need to do “X”.

Hum.

Let’s be clear. If leaders knew how to solve the problem, they would already be doing it. So let us offer some guidance for a positive change—a different approach to connecting to the workforce and the relevance of their work..

We’ve all been hearing for years that the majority of employees don’t feel involved or enthusiastic about their current job. And that doesn’t seem to be changing—Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workforce report found that 77% of workers categorize themselves as not engaged or actively disengaged at work. ¹ That’s a huge number!

So what CAN you do to reverse the trend? To change this feeling and get employees to be excited about their work and their jobs?

We think the first step is to listen. Does that sound too simple? Simple solutions are usually the best, and we often find that when we focus on the topic of listening in our leadership workshops, most participants, upon reflection, admit they aren’t doing a very good job.

So in the spirit of listening, we declare November 20th National Boss Listens Day. (Hallmark can create holidays, why can’t we?)

To celebrate National Boss Listens Day, we want bosses at all levels to stop and ask each of their team members three questions:

• What do you like about your job?
• What is the thing you dread the most about your job?
• What would energize you at work?

These open-ended questions create space for employees to share their thoughts and feelings. And their answers give you a starting point to understand what YOUR team is experiencing, how they feel about their jobs and their work, and how you can help best support them going forward.

The second step is to make some small, but meaningful changes.

And yes, we are declaring another holiday for this step. From here on, December 20th will National Work Reset Day.

This is the day for every boss to re-evaluate the work of their team. Based on the answers of National Boss Listens Day, managers would have enough information to identify workload imbalances, projects assigned to the wrong team member, or opportunities to stretch and develop their team. This Work Reset Day realigns and refocuses work so employees will be fully prepared for new, engaging challenges in the new year.

Two simple changes to help transform how employees feel they are valued, and how engaged they are at work. And the great thing is they can be done without any changes to corporate policies or red tape.

And we aren’t done yet! Part Two has two more suggestions for helping to solve the solution of employee engagement.

Stay tuned!

Source:

1 https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx