Opportunities
It's the final element because each employee needs to first go through the recruitment process, the support phase, and the building of relationships, before sound opportunities can present themselves.
Opportunities don't always need to be focused on career advancement. In fact, most times they're not. There are other ways of creating an environment where opportunities for your employees abound, and while opportunities continue to present themselves, your employees will remain engaged. Here are a few tried and tested ways of doing this:
Job variety
The actual work that employees do and the tasks they complete play a pivotal role in their levels of engagement. In many industries, there are a significant number of jobs that are monotonous, such as call centres and administrative positions. In roles like these, it's important to add as much variety as possible. If the amount of variety has been exhausted, communicate to your employees the importance and significance of their roles to the organisation.
Understanding how their jobs provide a substantial benefit will go some way in helping them develop an appreciation for what they do. When creating new positions, try to make them as interesting as possible. If after reading a position description you feel that it's boring, rather than accepting it as it is, find some way of adding variety that will make it more meaningful to the employee and beneficial to the organisation.
Development
Employees with the potential to be engaged need to be constantly learning and improving, which is why their continual development is so important. Regular coaching sessions, feedback, goal-setting, and training will make certain that this occurs.
Even experienced employees who have advanced skills need to be continually developed in some way. Setting stretch goals, providing them with additional responsibilities and presenting new experiences (such as time in a different department or job), are ways of preventing them from becoming stale and disengaged.
Involvement
Employees love to feel involved with what's happening in an organisation. The moment they start feeling like an outsider is the moment they begin to be disengaged. When leaders hold secret meetings visibly and don't communicate to their employees about what happened in the meeting, the employees make the assumption that their leaders are hiding something. This is not a healthy environment to work in. Instead, communicate the outcome of meetings to your employees, let them know what's going on, and even seek their input.
Involve your employees in meetings where decisions are made, that way they're able to contribute their own ideas and thoughts. Often some of the best suggestions come from front-line employees. Employees need to feel as though they're able to influence decisions within the organisation. Even if final decisions are made by the leadership team, it's important that the employees' feedback is taken on board, and if not put into practice, explanations should be provided to the employees out of courtesy.
Empowerment
In addition to significantly enhancing employee engagement, empowerment frees up a manager's time to focus on other aspects of her role. So how do you go about empowering your employees?
Decision-making is the key. Push decisions down. Let your employees decide on which course of action to take, even if it happens to be the wrong one. Some of the best learning experiences are those we learn by mistake.
Pass ownership of certain tasks to your team members but have quality assurance measures in place to ensure the highest of standards. This promotes ownership, and ownership engages your employees because they don't feel as if they need to constantly check with you for your approval.
Career progression
Career development doesn't need to be limited to vertical progression. Horizontal moves into other departments can be just as rewarding to an employee. The important thing is to spend time gaining an understanding of your employees' career goals and then formulating a detailed career action plan to help them get there.
Have regular career discussions (at least monthly) with your employees to make sure that you're on track and provide them with the tools they need to be able to move on to bigger and better things. Let them know that you're available to help them get to where they want to be. Perhaps organise some time for them to shadow someone who's doing the role they aspire to, and provide them with additional responsibilities that pertain to that role.
Such a focus on career progression scares some managers as they believe they'd lose people quickly. In fact, the opposite is true. When your employees know that you're looking out for their best interests, they'll stay with you for a longer period than first planned because they'd be happy waiting for the perfect job to arrive rather than leave for a job they think is less than perfect.
Mentoring
Mentoring within organisations provides opportunities for the protégés that are taking part in a mentoring program. Opportunities are created in terms of networking contacts and potential job openings. In addition, the coaching and guidance the protégés receive from their mentors provides them with the skills and industry awareness that will create opportunities down the track.
A great mentor is someone who has already achieved significant success in a particular field. It's best for the mentor to be approachable, open to sharing their learning experiences, a sound communicator, honest, a good motivator, and importantly, must be willing to spend about one or two hours each month with their protégé.
Networking
"It's not what you know, it's who you know." How many times have you heard that? To a certain extent, it's true. There's a greater chance your employees will progress further in their careers if they're provided with opportunities to build relationships with people from other departments - and even with people from other organisations.
For this reason, send your team members to industry functions, breakfasts, seminars, and workshops. Get them involved in meetings where managers from other departments are present. Do what you can to expose them to the right people in the right places.
Read the article 'The First Key Element Of Employee Engagement - Recruitment'
Read the article 'The Second Key Element Of Employee Engagement - Support'
Read the article 'The Third Key Element Of Employee Engagement - Relationships'
Buy James Adonis’ Audio Seminar CD from the Resource Centre:
Employee Engagement: Solved!