Disengaged people are a threat to your business and with global engagement at drastically low levels, there’s plenty of improvement needed in this area.

Studies show that global employee engagement levels are incredibly low. As we know, lost engagement leads to lost productivity and revenue. While creating a culture of engagement is everyone’s responsibility, leaders need to drive this. Yet their engagement levels aren’t much better. The studies also found a disturbing number of leaders either not engaged or actively disengaged.

While these numbers are confronting, as a leader, there are steps you can take to drive engagement with your people.

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• Improve leader engagement first. You can’t expect your people to be engaged if those driving the strategy and culture of a company are disengaged themselves. Start by improving engagement levels of your leaders, before you focus on your people.
• Watch your language. How leaders in an organisation speak is crucial. Establish a common language in your leadership team and ensure everyone is echoing the same theme and using words that drive and improve culture.
• Be accountable. While everyone within an organisation is responsible for engagement, a crucial part of leadership is creating an environment that encourages, facilitates and rewards engagement. Measure the engagement of your leaders and people frequently and build cultural KPIs into your leaders’ success measures.
• Understand differences. Creating structure around instilling engagement into your workplace is important, as people learn and change in different ways, according to where they are in life and where they are at professionally. View your people as humans, instead of teams or units, and your path to engagement will be an easier journey.

Both people and leadership engagement need to be built into your overall business strategy, as quite simply, engaged employees lead to better business.

Author: Peter Robinson
Team Leadership Services