Every company’s dream is to have a team of engaged, motivated and driven staff. An engaged workforce means better productivity, a happier environment, and positive work culture.
The HR team must look for ways to maintain high employee engagement constantly. It is their responsibility to foster a healthy relationship with their employees.
But many managers still need to be more knowledgeable about this hot topic and keep no track of how happy or engaged their workforce is. This leads to many repercussions, especially a high turnover rate. To avoid such an awful situation, we have curated a list of possible mistakes a manager makes that lead to lower employee engagement. Let’s look, learn, and act.
8 Common Employee Engagement Mistakes to Avoid
Working Without a Mission
Any organization thrives when its vision, mission, ethics, and principles are clearly explained to everyone. If your team doesn’t have these, they have to wait around to know what to do next. This makes the employees feel disengaged and demotivated.
The best way to avoid this situation is by creating a business mission and vision and sharing it with your employees. This way, they will clearly understand what is expected of them and how to achieve it. This will make them feel empowered and engaged with the company.
- Setting Unrealistic Goals and Difficult to Achieve Deadlines
Yes, goals should not be straightforward to attain as this may strike boredom and won’t reveal the employee’s true potential. It should, however, be manageable as well.
Creating deadlines that are extremely difficult to achieve kills employee morale and affects the overall work culture and organization goals.
- Lack Of Appreciation
Everyone likes a pat on their back upon doing something extraordinary. So, if they are given a challenging task and dedicate extra time and effort to finish it to perfection, don’t you think they should be applauded?
Appreciating and recognizing your employees when exceeding your expectations goes a long way.
- Absence of Work-Life Balance
Everyone has their personal life, which should be respected at all costs. To foster an environment of growth and happiness, every department should mandatorily value each other’s time. Do not try and boss over your employees 24*7 and expect them to stay at your organization.
- Poor Communication
Do not be that boss every worker in the company is scared of. Instead, try to be one with whom they can easily share all their work fears, challenges, and accomplishments. When you are a manager, you do not have to be emotionless; you should instead pitch your ideas to them and communicate how you feel your business goals should be met.
- Lack of Emotional Connect
While rolling out new policies and procedures, the management stays very driven, and employees are not. They keep rolling out new values and missions, which fall flat because employees feel separate, disengaged, and not involved in the process.
If the process includes participation and insights from employees, the chances of employees being emotionally invested increase, and the likelihood of the project becoming successful also increases.
- Criticizing Performance
While evaluating performances, always be careful of the language. Use your sentences in a manner that gets to the heart of the problem and not initiates blame. Approach the conversation with the right tone and intent. Do not demean and insult your staff.
- Conducting too-many surveys
Surveys should be annual; you should only drown your staff in a few surveys. For effective feedback, there should be a clear strategy, a well-defined HR objective, and an actionable follow-up plan.
Conclusion
Highly engaged and motivated employees make a difference in the company’s culture and ROI. Engaged employees are emotionally invested in their organization, and thus managers should take the proper steps in the right direction to achieve high levels of employee engagement.
Also, companies can use employee engagement software to measure employee engagement and avoid all the blunders mentioned above. With the right tools, companies can retain top talent by keeping them motivated and engaged.
