Are your Team Engaged? In Blackboard Fridays Episode 130, Anna talks about Culture. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

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Transcript

Some of the ways to keep employees engaged. There are three areas that I like to work in when we talk about team engagement and employee engagement.

The first one is care about them and their progress. So these things can be along the lines of regular feedback, so we don’t believe in the annual performance review anymore, and that’s really important for you to understand.

You need to get together with your employees really often, and that could be weekly, monthly, or at that maximum, quarterly, and talking to them about themselves and their goals. This isn’t just pulling them up on KPIs. This is really getting to know them and understanding them a bit more, and so they feel that you care about them.

Another way for employees to understand that you care about them is that you actually care about their opinion. You’ve got different ways and means within your business to collect feedback and opinions from your employees, and you take their opinions seriously. That’s really important. They can get the feedback from you on that stuff, and they can see things happening from time to time based on their opinions.

Friendship is a really important part about employee engagement. There has to be someone within the organization that an employee trusts and likes, that they can go to if they’ve got a problem every day of the week. It’s not you as the employer, it’s someone within their colleague base.

It’s really important, then, you make effort as employers to have activities, social functions where people can get to know each other, and so that’s that sense of belonging within the team and that people feel safe that they have got somebody to talk to outside of their management group.

Achieving things, one of the things that’s really important around caring about people’s progress is that you celebrate the big wins or the little wins. You don’t need to celebrate these in an enormous way, but you could just have a weekly meeting, you could put your wins on your internal communication channel.

There’s lots of different ways that you could do that. Celebrate these little wins along the way so that the team know that you’re caring about them, you’re listening to them, you’re hearing what they’re up to, and it will make a big difference within their engagement.

The second area is really about their role and how that fits into the broader vision of the business. It’s really important for employers and leaders to be sharing the vision all the time in lots of different ways. It’s really important that the team members and the employees understand the connection between their role and the vision of the business.

The other thing, too, that’s really important about roles is that employees who are really highly engaged will really wanna work with other highly engaged people. The people around them need to be just as committed as they are. No one wants to carry a load for someone who’s slacking off. It’s really important that we monitor that on a regular basis, and that will help with engagement.

Finally, it’s all about expectations. Expectations must be really clear. To enable you to allow the team to become highly engaged, they need to know what their roles are. They need to know what the expectations are. They need to be able to self measure. It’s important that they have KPIs and they know where they’re headed and they know what they’re meant to achieve, but they are able to measure it themselves. That’s really crucial.

The other really important part around expectations is the employees need to be able to control at least some of their role, even if it’s not everything. They need to be able to walk in and control their role on a daily basis. That’s really important to engagement.

Finally, it’s extremely important that you get all the tools and the processes and systems in place for an employee to do their job effectively and achieve all these wins we want them to achieve. That should get you started, so thanks. If you have any more questions, let us know at businessDEPOT.

Next Steps

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