So, maybe these 7 tips won’t really ramp up your EE Sex Appeal. But, I’ll bet you they will help you (and your people) accomplish the following:

• Improved morale and motivation.
• Stronger, more successful communications within your team.
• Increased suggestions, recommendations, and innovative improvements.
• Greater employee, customer, and manager satisfactions.

Try 1, 2, or all 7. Check the results. Let me hear from you.

Town Hall Meetings. You may not have time or reason to hold a true and complete Town Hall Meeting. But you may want to include a "town hall segment" as part of your regular staff meeting in which everyone is invited to ask questions, offer feedback, and air concerns . It’s a lot like an open-door policy, but it happens at a certain time and you don’t have to be in your office. You don’t even have to have a door–open or otherwise.

Go Beyond "How are you?" When you greet a staff member first thing in the morning or pass someone in the corridor, bring what you know about the person, her work, her personal life to the fore. "Janet, how did your presentation to the PTA go last week?" will mean a lot more to Janet than the perfunctory, "How are you?" (This may require continuous homework by you.)

Make Obvious Time to Understand. If a staff member brings an issue, a concern, a suggestion, a fact of information to your attention, never rush past it, hurry through it, or hasten around it. Make it clear that what he thinks is important enough to bring to you is important to you as well. Phrases like, "tell me more," "let’s talk about that for a minute," "I’d like to spend a little time on that with you" underline the value you give the employee.

Recognize Contributions to Process Value. In addition to formal celebrations of achievement and accomplishment, make it your personal business to acclaim when/where/how members of the team have contributed to process(es) utilized by the team. It may be an innovation, an improvement, a correction. Be specific in the recognition by specifying the contribution. Mention it in passing. Discuss it over lunch. Make it part of how you introduce one person to another.

Seek Continuous Input. It will take repetitive invitations, but you can have your people offering suggestions for improvement constantly. To do this, create/select your preferred question that invites such input: "How can we…?" "What might we do to…?" "What ideas do you have that…?" Make the question your spoken mantra. Ask it all the time, in all situations, to all members of your team.

Admit (or Pretend) You Don’t Know It All. One of the first managers I worked for used this action to let his people know they — and their ideas –  mattered. Often when I mentioned something to him, he commented, "Hey, I want to know more about that. Walk with me and fill me in." Then he rose from his chair and we walked to the coffee pot or around the office or out to the parking lot. This action demonstrated how important time with me and my ideas was for him. (And he did it with everyone who worked for him!)

Be Spontaneously Happy. Using e-mail or whiteboard or Post-it(tm) Notes, communicate even minor good feelings about specific employee actions and achievements. Recognition does not have to be a Big Deal because simply recognizing the value people bring to their jobs is a big deal.

These 7 Ways to Increase Your Employee Engagement Sex Appeal have one thing in common: communication from the manager/supervisor to the employee. That one commonality spreads over three types of communication:

1. Communication that the manager cares about the person.
2. Communication that the manager receives and values the employee’s opinions and ideas.
3. Communication that the manager recognizes and appreciates good work that is valuable to the company.

What employee, given these communications sincerely and continually offered, would not be more ready to engage in what he does, where he does it, and for whom he does it?

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Tags: Employee Engagement, employee engagement culture, increasing engagement, managing personnel, work environment.