What to do when your staff aren’t actively engaged

As a business owner, it’s exhausting when your employees are not actively engaged in their jobs. You find it’s left to you to drive your business forward, constantly motivating and pushing your employees to perform at the level that you’d like them to operate at.

What if there was a better way to encourage your staff to not just do their job, or punch their card, but to actually become a vital part of growing your business and sharing your load?
A recent Gallop Poll was conducted on whether staff were actively engaged in the workplace. The results were staggering. Only 17% of employees said they felt actively engaged in the workplace. 20-33% were actively disengaged! And the rest? Well, they didn’t know one way or the other.

What do we mean by ‘Actively Engaged’?

An employee that is actively engaged in their job is doing more than going through the motions. By them doing their job the business is being driven forward. Salespeople are bringing in better, more qualified customers while the people at the coal face are doing their job effectively, efficiently and enthusiastically while working cohesively with the other members of staff, as well as with other departments.

What are the benefits of active engagement in the workplace?

As I mentioned in the point above, it’s about people doing their job enthusiastically and well. But the knock on positive effect of this is huge. It can mean the difference in lost revenue through jobs needing to be repeated. It could be the difference between retaining customers or having to spend more time in acquiring new ones. But these are just the logistics. The underlying effect is that the business is able to grow through having the time, energy and aptitude for developing new systems, or changes to current ones that can allow for better overall efficiencies and quality.

When staff are actively engaged, and they do their job well, then they are in a position to afford more time and brainpower into refining the product or service that you deliver. It allows them time to put their head up and see what the rest of the market is doing. To proactively create new or complementary products or services for your business.

How do I make sure my employees are actively engaged?

You lead them! You see it comes down to safety. If a person is feeling threatened, stressed or adrift, then it’s near impossible for them to function in any way other than the human default of autopilot. Their conscious and the subconscious brain is working overtime just to survive. There is simply no brain power left for the luxury of doing their job well. When you remove this brain ‘fog’ of insecurity then their engagement can have space to increase.

Safety in the workplace (and I don’t mean health and safety, though this can impact performance too) is about taking the leadership role and providing employees with clear values, vision, strategy and focus. Knowing that you as their leader are ‘protecting the clan’ results in them feeling not just secure in their job, but secure that they can stretch their abilities while knowing the boundaries with which they can do this in.

Your role of a leader will change dramatically when you move from pushing from the rear to leading from the front and it will be reflected by the businesses leadership in the marketplace that there is clear leadership internally.

If you’re not sure how to lead from the front contact us to discuss your business!