This year summer won’t end until September 22: at precisely 23:09 EDT. But Labor Day is when we gear up for the last 4 months of the year. Do you and your business plan an upshift for any of these objectives for the rest of 2010?
- Increased revenue?
- Reduced expenses?
- More customers, especially more satisfied customers?
- Holding on to talent, especially if employment figures start to rise?
- Recruiting more new talent, especially if your ability to hire improves?
- What else?
Or maybe you’re simply looking for more business and better business between now and the end of the year. Now’s the time to pay extra attention to how you can link employee engagement efforts to specific objectives for the remainder of 2010. You want your employees to engage in their work and you want them to engage in thinking about engagement. You can encourage that thinking by asking questions. Attempting to answer is a basic human response. [Note: how comfortably the individual actually voices the answer depends on your support of open communication in your workplace.] Consider asking questions such as these simple samples:
- How can we increase our customers’ satisfaction this fall?
- What are some ways we might reduce our expenses and save money?
- Have you any ideas that might help us bring in more revenue?
- What might attract talented, qualified candidates to work with us?
- What would make employees want to stay on even longer?
How and when and where will you ask the questions? You want the questions to stick in the employees’ minds, so they will have time and motivation to consider answers. You want the questions to invite responses rather than to threaten fear of giving a bad answer. You want the questions and answers to become ongoing elements of conversation (a primary form of engagement!). Why not create and maintain a once-a-week Employee Engagement E-mail?
- Briefly summarize an engagement example from another company (a customer? a competitor? another industry?).
- Relate that example to the specific objective of engagement (perhaps from the list above).
- Ask the relevant question.
I invite you to suggest back — via the Comment box below — how you will make the Q&A ongoing conversations that turbo-charge your employees’ engagement.
Tags: Creativity, Employee Engagement, inspiration, motivation, performance improvement
