If you’re leading a team, business, or workplace, it can be difficult to keep your employees engaged. When deadlines approach, assignments and projects abound, and your team feels more burnt out than excited, the goal of maintaining employee focus, energy, and positive attitudes can seem difficult to achieve.
What concrete steps can you take to ensure that your team stays as engaged as possible? Here are 7 that will definitely get you on the right track.
1. Work to build relationships
If you put in the effort required to build real and significant relationships with the people on your team, they will feel a personal responsibility to do their work better, rather than just a professional one.
2. Make work comfy
If it feels good to go to work, then your employees will be happier there—despite how hectic and crazy things may sometimes be. Creating an environment where people’s voices are heard and where their opinions matter is vital to making work a great place to be.\
3. Maintain transparency
The best leaders are honest and transparent—offering as many details as they can, whenever they can. If you’re honest about what you do, your employees will feel inspired to do the same.
4. Give constructive feedback
When your team feels like their work is valued and appreciated, they’ll have the energy to work even harder. And, when you do have feedback to give, people will better know what you want to see in their work—resulting in more positive reactions overall.
5. Offer opportunities for collaboration
Your employees offer your organization a tremendously broad pallet of life and business experience, and they will be far more engaged in their jobs if you provide them with opportunities to contribute. Creating cross-functional teams—where you pull in people from different departments and levels to solve a problem or leverage an opportunity—is a great way to engage your employees and gain the benefit of their contributions.
6. Keep your promises
Are you the kind of leader who makes a point of keeping your promises? If not, then you will earn nothing more than a bad reputation—and employees who do not trust you. And that’s not something you want—especially not as a leader.
7. Appreciate your team
Taking the time to thank your team members for their work is a small—but amazingly effective way—of showing how much you appreciate them. Say “thank you,” and watch how their efforts bloom.
