Julia Langkraehr’s Blog

keeping your employees engaged

How to keep your employees engaged

If you ask your employees or team members their number one complaint, it is normally that “they didn’t know”. While owners think they keep them informed of what is going on, staff don’t know.

Engagement might be low because employees feel they are fumbling around in the dark. They don’t know what they should be doing, how to engage or where the company is going.

Often, owners and founders think they have been talking to their employees until they are blue in the face, but they either haven’t been clear, or they haven’t repeated themselves enough.

Keeping your employees engaged is even more important at the moment, with much of the world in lock-down and so many staff working from home.

There are two disciplines that must be strong in your organisation in what EOS calls the People component. You can have the best product, service, funding, marketing and brand but if you don’t have the right people who are engaged, in the right seats, delivering on their role, then you will never make your vision a reality.

Questions to ask when you find engagement is low:
  • Do your employees know the core values?
  • Are the core values traits that the employees’ can exhibit?
  • Do they know their roles and responsibilities?
  • Have you been explicitly clear about the structure of the organisation and the seat for each employee?
  • Does each employee know the five key roles of their seat as stated in the Accountability Chart?
  • Have you as the leaders of the organisation evolved and updated the Accountability Chart as the company grows and the roles change?
Here are some ways to improve engagement among your employees:
  1. We suggest that you teach your leaders to have a quarterly regular meeting pulse with their direct reports to:
  • talk about what is working and what is not in the organisation from their point of view
  • use the People Analyser to review if both the direct reports and employees are living and exhibiting the company’s core values
  • review the quarterly Rocks, share the V/TO and set the priorities for the next 90 days.
  1. Have regular quarterly State of the Company meetings, bringing the whole organisation together to go through where you have been at the beginning of the last quarter, where you are today and where they are going in the next 90 days.

Depending on the size of your organisation, this can be a meeting as short as 30 minutes, or you hold a half day or full day team building meeting.  Sharing a meal or doing team building exercises, which include a treasure hunt, a tour, an escape room, team games, or Segways can all help keep employees engaged.

As an example, in my company in the summer, our quarterly state of the company meeting included a barbeque where we shopped, cooked and ate together in then park, and then played a game of rounders, which helped build the team.

At Bold Clarity when we’re back in the office, we’ll be having a “bring your child to work day” with a company lunch in the Rainforest Cafe, and I’m also thinking of hiring a manicurist for our next quarterly meeting.

Read more: how to create a healthy team
  1. Encourage your team members to set up groups such as choirs, book clubs, or to organise charity fundraising events.

This promotes the wellbeing of your team, and helps people to bond and work together.

  1. Encouraging team members to continue their education – such as having Ted Talk Tuesdays, or using online learning and educational apps like Coresea and Blinklist, plus sending them on workshops, seminars and conferences.

This helps employees feel that companies care about their people and the company is investing in them and their future.

Read more: Four lessons about working from home

Each company has a different personality according to the founders, the structure, the core values and the culture. What is important is for leaders to be thoughtful about how they want their culture to show up and evolve. When company culture is not thoughtfully managed, a culture might be created that is not productive or conducive to teams working efficiently, effectively and executing on the vision.

To find out more about how the Entrepreneurial Operating System can help you keep your employees engaged, contact us.