Employee Engagement Leadership: How Building an Engaging Workplace Starts From the Top

Cindy Mielke

Your leadership team plays an important role in your employee engagement strategy, so having engaged managers, in addition to non-managerial employees, should be a priority. Strong employee engagement leadership helps build a positive work culture, keep workers motivated, improve retention rates, and cultivate strong relationships.

With this in mind, you may consider adding methods for maximizing engagement within your leadership development plans. Developing enthusiastic leaders is crucial to having happy and productive teams.

Leveraging Employee Engagement Leadership

Engaged employees drive corporate growth, but they need excellent management to thrive. A toxic culture is the number one reason employees quit, followed by job insecurity, according to MIT Sloan Management Review. High stress came in at number three, followed by failing to recognize employee performance at number four.

Here are the best ways to influence employee engagement leadership so that your workplace feels supportive and collaborative to everyone.

Get Performance Metrics

Monitoring leadership performance is essential to employee satisfaction. Help executive leaders determine the areas that need improvement by encouraging leaders to issue surveys and request feedback periodically. Coaching managers to ask their people questions about the work environment and workload is another good way to foster open and honest communication between teams and leadership. The goal is to start a dialogue about the level of support teams receive in the workplace. Some questions to ask are:

How is your project going?
How can I help?
What do you need?
What kind of support do you need?
What can I do differently?

Make Frequent Announcements

You want your employees to feel informed on important company news. Communicate the stories and events that affect your organization, like publicized interviews with executives, new industry competitors, or new products in development. If your staff is in the know, they’ll feel more connected and engaged with your company.

Reward Performance

You can strengthen employee engagement leadership by recognizing performance in real time. Start by finding out what motivates your managers and incorporate recognition as a regular part of your work environment.

Leading Through a Shared Vision

Your employee engagement leaders should know how to communicate the company’s purpose and achieve the expected outcomes. In addition, they must ignite passion, or at least a desire to reach company goals, and understand how to state what’s necessary for success in a straightforward way.

Managers should also communicate when teams and individuals exceed these expectations. Recognition motivates recipients and coworkers, especially when you announce the achievement company wide. Official announcements are also important if the company receives praise from the industry or community. That way, employees can share in the sense of pride.

Finally, a true leader is observant, noticing how and when jobs get done. Their presence is known even with remote teams. Ultimately, you want employees engaged in the business mission who consistently perform at high levels because they share the organization’s values.

Cultivating Self-Awareness

Train leaders to evaluate how they align with the company vision and how their behavior and presence align with their department’s results through a high level of self-awareness. Leaders encourage engagement when they act and speak authentically in alignment with the organization’s values.

Motivating and Inspiring Teams

Encourage leaders to use their creativity to inspire employee engagement. Sometimes great ideas are the simplest ones:

Coordinate volunteer opportunities to show employees their managers care about their favorite causes.
Make mental and physical health a priority by holding meditation and exercise classes or subsidizing gym memberships.
Set up an outing like a game or a hike so employees can connect outside of the workplace.

Improving Employee Engagement Leadership

Excellent employee engagement leadership comes down to communicating goals, expectations, and recognition of best efforts. Everyone, from the executives down to the line workers, needs to know where the company is going, the role they play in getting there, and that their contributions are appreciated to feel completely engaged.

Since employee engagement depends heavily on your leadership, make sure they have the skills to deploy your incentive program and, in turn, feel engaged in their work. Finally, your leadership needs the right technology for motivating engagement.

Here’s how we can help. Rewards Genius, our free self-serve web portal, makes it easy for you to order, send, and track digital gift cards in one simple place. With Rewards Genius, you can reward your team in real time.