Eight Ways To Engage Employees During A Downturn

• Employee engagement regularly accounts for up to 50 percent of the variance in customer service
  
  
• A disengaged employee can cost you 30 times as much in safety-related incidents, and
  
  
• Disengaged employees are over 85 percent more likely to leave
  
  

Engagement comes not from dollars but from more personal factors ... 

Eight ways to keep your employees engaged for the long-term:

1. Listen to your employees - Most people want to work for an employer who cares enough to listen. The best way to know what your employees need and expect is to ask them - and then listen carefully to their answers.
   
   
2. Provide clear, consistent expectations - Vague policies and unclear expectations can make employees feel irritated, unsafe and even paranoid. This leads to your employees becoming disengaged. They click into survival mode instead of focusing on how to help the company succeed.
   
   
3. Give employees a sense of importance - This has a greater impact on loyalty and customer service than all other factors COMBINED.
   
   
4. Develop opportunities for advancement - The chance to work your way up the ladder is a tremendous incentive for productivity, bonding, and employee engagement.
   
   
5. Create good relationships with others in the workplace - If you have a toxic relationship with your employees, you can forget about asking them to put their shoulder to the wheel for the company.
   
   
6. Offer regular feedback - If you want to keep your employees moving forward, give them the occasional rudder report. And don't forget positive feedback, which should ideally outnumber the negative by about 5 to 1.
   
   
7. Celebrate and reward success - Set realistic targets, then reward and celebrate when they are reached. And don't wait for the end of a big project to celebrate. Pick landmarks along the way and go nuts when you hit them.
   
   
8. Move from "the company" to "our company" - The heart and soul of engagement is ownership. As long as your employees feel they are working to help YOU make YOUR company succeed, engagement will be low. Once you get them to see themselves as partners in the endeavor-making decisions, staying informed, sharing in the company's ups and downs - everything changes. Engagement soars.
   
   

Just imagine a workplace in which employees feel important and listened to, in which expectations are clear and feedback consistent, in which relationships and shared ownership are cultivated, advancement is available, and success is celebrated.

Now stop imagining it and CREATE it!

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