How Leaders Can Better Engage with Employees
The average person spends around 90,000 hrs of their life working and yet many employees feel their workplace is broken, and that they don’t feel cared for and developed at work. Who wants to spend 90k hours feeling like that?!
To engage and develop employees, we need better leaders in the workplace. Managers need to be better listeners, coaches, and collaborators. Great managers help colleagues learn and grow, recognize their colleagues for doing great work, and make them truly feel cared about.
My guest in HRchat episode 506 is Matt Tresidder, CEO and founder of Leadr, a people development software that helps leaders grow and develop team members. Listen as we discuss ways to prime your leaders to better engage and inspire their employees.
Matt joined Leadr after six years at the unicorn startup Pushpay where he led all facets of the sales team. He is passionate about hiring, training, and developing leaders at every level of the organization.
Questions For Matt Include:
- Do you think leaders of hybrid/remote teams get as much out of/engage with employees to the same extent as full-time office-based orgs?
- According to Gallup research, 79% of workers are disengaged in the workplace. At the same time, we know that companies with engaged workers have 23% more profits. Additionally, teams with thriving workers see significantly lower absenteeism, turnover, and accidents; they also see higher customer loyalty… so why do you think so many employees are disengaged and what can HR and leaders do about it?
- So we’ve all probably had good 1:1 meetings and bad 1:1 meetings. Do you have any recommendations for making sure you have more good meetings than not?
- Let’s say a leader is doing all of these things, how do they know if it’s working, how would you measure if all this time in 1:1s and asking very intentional questions like these are actually contributing to higher employee engagement?
- Why do some leaders micromanage? Is it often down to their insecurities or lack of knowledge?
- In a recent blog post about ways employees can better communicate with aloof or micromanaging leaders, you suggest proactive communication is the answer and can be broken into three categories: For Your Information, For a Discussion, and For a Decision. Talk to me about each and the scenarios where they can make a positive difference
- Let’s talk about company culture and alignment with the mission of the org: In a post called You Live Out Your Core Values? you suggest: “Often companies say they uphold a certain set of attitudes or behaviors, but when you talk to their staff or customers, you find out they come across completely different. There’s a disconnect.” You suggest that there are two principles that can help match behavior to expectation: Lowest Common Denominator and Leaders are not exempt. Tell us about each.
Want to learn more? Check out Leadr’s Ultimate Guide to Better 1:1 Meetings & The ROI of Employee Engagement.