I love this particular study mostly because the Gallup organization not only studied what employee engagement looks like, but they also studied the results of a highly engaged workforce compared to the typical, marginally engaged.
As a business owner trying my hardest to run a profitable business, those are the numbers that really get my attention. According to the Gallup studies, I can increase my bottom line by 100 – 300% just by fully engaging my workforce. THAT I can get excited about!
We’re starting a new series of 2 Minute Trainers this year with concrete ideas for implementing some of the Gallup’s engagement concepts. We hope you find them interesting – but most importantly we hope you find that they give you ideas for creating your own concrete approaches to engaging your team.
Question #1: Do you know what is expected of you at work? (Engaged employees, only 28% of the typical workforce, answered this question – YES)
Idea #1: Job descriptions. How many of us have job descriptions we simply create for job categories rather than for each individual? A housekeeper is a housekeeper, right? A caregiver is a caregiver…and so on.
In reality, one housekeeper is an awesome organizer, and may find herself gradually taking over the organization of the linen storage closet.
One housekeeper may have special skills at soothing and bathing challenging clients.
Ideally, each individual employee should have an individual job description. Perhaps you take your job category description and add, during a personally meeting, tasks that the person is especially skilled at doing. You can recognize their special talents, interests and gifts, while reinforcing the overall job expectations.
Another idea is to create job description training modules that spell out exactly what your expectations are for each job category. For example, you might follow a caregiver around for a day with a video camera and show each aspect of her job expectation in video mode.
Be sure to include the kinds of duties that all staff need to do: customer service expectations, for example.
We’ve created a very quick sample that you’re welcome to duplicate for your own team. You can even send it to us and we’ll add it to your on-line training and create a certificate as well.
EXAMPLE
Idea #2: Job meetings. We’ve started a tradition in our office of monthly job meetings. I schedule them for Friday afternoons – a good time to wrap up the week’s work a little early and sit down with each employee for a few minutes – usually 10 – 15 minutes – and review their work.
It took us a month or two to hammer out written job expectations for each person, including what goals they had in their jobs, and how we would measure their success to know when they were doing their jobs well.
Now, each person has a quick report that fits exactly with their goals, and we discuss any areas of change, improvement, challenge or achievement. We often laugh together, and get excited about actually measuring accomplishments, instead of just rushing from task to task.
Idea #3: Mentoring. As often as possible I pair up a new employee with a seasoned employee who can answer their questions and make sure they’re on track in their work. Often, I ask two employees to work on a task together and come up with a plan, without my input. I’ve discovered that – surprise – I don’t actually need to make decisions in a lot of areas, especially if the employees have a track record of good, solid work.
Hope this gives you some concrete ideas to implement part one of our engagement process.
We’ll tackle part 2 next month.
