Retain Top Talent

Are some of your managers who lead the bulk of your employees having issues about their own engagement. Front line employees observe this attitude and become disengaged when their boss is disengaged.

Here's the quote that reinforced this idea:

"Leader disengagement often happens for the same reasons as employee disengagement. They don’t feel respected by their manager, they don’t feel like they have a say in decision making, and they aren’t kept in the loop in terms of communication. Finally, they usually don’t receive enough positive feedback and appreciation themselves as leaders. Lack of leader motivation and engagement tends to breed cynicism, sarcasm, and negativity in the leader."

Great list of employee reward/recognition ideas broken down in key categories. Are you testing any of these ideas in your company?

Teach your managers these six simple phrases to say to their teams and you'll see a dramatic improvement in happiness, engagement, and job satisfaction.

An overwhelming number of ideas that you could you use to immediately boost employee recognition. Just pick one for an immediate impact.

Some really good suggestions and ideas - simple to implement to bolster engagement and strengthen your culture with remote workers. How many of the items on this list are you currently working on?

Here's a contrarian view of why self-run internal employee recognition programs fail. Granted, the authors are biased since they are recommending their software SaaS model. However, I've see an extraordinary explosion in some very good SaaS apps for companies to more effectively manage employee engagement - apps for tracking success factors, projects, recognition programs, employee satisfaction, and many others.

Is now a good time to look at some of these app-based tools as many of your team members are remote?

Great set of statements that are compliments for co-workers. I frequently find that workers and managers don't know what to say to each other. It's not natural for most people to be sensitive, empathic, kind, gracious, generous, and positive in their feeback.

Imagine what your culture would be like if you trained your employees to use these words with each other? Could you quantify the leap in positive energy?

Good short perspective on employee engagement in Chief Executive Magazine. Bottom line - formalizing communication made a big difference. I assume it was along the lines of communicating vision, mission, purpose, recognition, and feedback.

It could also be along the lines of teaching/training managers to be coaches - how to listen, how to give praise, how to give feeback.

If you've been following my posts, you know that I am a huge proponent of showing praise, appreciation, gratitude, and recognition. Here is an article that highlights 6 simple and easy to implement tactics for improving retention.

Interesting article distinguishing between recognition and appreciation. Most companies have some form of minimal recognition initiatives, yet very few focus on the element of appreciation. Is your lack of appreciation and gratitude undermining your employee engagement and ability to retain to top performers?

Key points in this article about keeping it personal and not micro-managing. Unfortunately, we seem to violate both ideas.

While folks are working from home, many managers appear to have slipped into a mode of only talking about tasks and activities, and have forgotten how to show empathy, appreciation, caring, and sensitivity for their team members. Maybe it's time for some remedial managerial training on empathy.

I thought this was a good breakdown of different elements of the language of appreciation. Most employees don't feel appreciated enough and most managers don't know how to appreciate their employees.

Good ideas and reinforcement about employee recognition and appreciation. I liked giving shout-outs on social media to teams and individual employees and having managers write hand-written notes to their subordinates who then post those notes on the refrigerator so the whole family can see how much they are appreciated.

This article did a good job separating the ideas of recognition and appreciation. Sometimes, CEOs get confused over which one requires what tactics - or one gets ignored.

Some good ideas from the Zoom blog about the problems and issues around culture when everyone is working from home. Have you tried some of these ideas yet?

You know I'm a huge proponent of praise, recognition, and non=-monetary rewards to stimulate retention, engagement, and employee happiness. This article gives some good examples and shares some of the primary research around this topic.

Sometimes in the rush and pressure of business, we forget that we're dealing with human beings who require a little praise, empathy, encouragement, interaction, and kindness.

Although the author mentions a number of very simple things, like celebrating birthdays, I still find that many companies show tthat they don't care about their people by ignoring some of these most basic elements. 

Where are you on the spectrum of caring, empathy, and specific tactics? When I help my clients develop compelling advertising, one of the most common phrases they throw back at me is "we're a family oriented environment."

When I ask for a couple of examples of why they say that - all I get is a blank look. Can you back up your statements with examples about your culture, values, and how the company cares about the employees?

You probably know from my posts that I am a huge advocate of kindness, grace, appreciation, and gratitude in the workplace. I'm going to suggest that this concept is so far beyond most executives and CEOs that it could be coming from outer space.

The current generation of executives and many managers are indoctrinated from their bosses and mentors with the need to yell, scream, be angry, and show little mercy. They are rude, inconsiderate and don't really care about people in their actions. in most companies, there is very little appreciation, grace, and gratitude.

The challenge for most executives and managers is how to balance the need for execution and attainment of goals with caring about people through appreciation, grace, and gratitude.

Without the appropriate balance, it will be very tough to keep high performers in your organization in the coming years.

How do you do it?

Interesting perspective on empathy in the organization as being a key element of employee engagement. the striking statistic to me was the gap between the CEOs perception of being an empathetic organization and employee perception.