MANAGMENT

Engaging, Motivating and Inspiring Workforce



Engaging, Motivating and Inspiring Workforce

Introduction

With the advancement in technology, the world has become a global village; and it has impacted the businesses worldwide. The top-management has to look after their workforce, and the effectiveness of workforce. With cut-throat competition across industries, and a wide basket of choices and offerings from companies, a high attrition rate is seen where employees do not bat an eyelid before changing jobs (Pettinger, 1998). It is essential for organisations and businesses to engage inspire and motivate the workforce.

Discussion

Engaging Workforce

An engaged employee is someone who will go that extra mile for your company. Companies with high employee engagement levels grow on average 4.5 times faster than those with low levels (Russell, 2010). Engaged employees mean lower staff turnover & higher productivity. However, engagement takes work. To make their employees engaged, organization should adopt the following strategies.

Cultivate Conversation & Collaboration: To be successful, organizations need to foster dialogues. Organizations should encourage provide platform for a dynamic interaction among employees, where employees can engage each other to brainstorm, build upon one another's ideas, add comments and collaborate.

While such employee interactions can help develop a sense of community, the most successful innovation initiatives don't stop at employee-to-employee communications. For a true two-way dialogue to take hold, management must also engage in the conversation to provide feedback, offer encouragement and help shape idea fragments into actionable opportunities.

Tackle Today's Business Challenges: To generate quick, visible results one should focus people's attention on current business problems, unit objectives and market opportunities. Challenge employees to tackle specific questions. Problem solving allows employees to start from a common framework and build outward. Ideas and solutions generated from such an approach are more likely to be implemented because they deal with an organization's most pressing business needs. When employees see that business units value their ideas on real problems, they will be more willing to engage in innovation going forward. Shared problem solving helps build a sense of community and collaboration. When employee-driven ideas match up well with established business priorities, existing business units may already have staff and infrastructure in place to evaluate, build upon and execute these ideas.

Own the Problem — and the Process: Employee innovation cannot happen on its own. To foster a culture of innovation, companies must develop and manage a process to take ideas to action, with success contingent on the involvement of four constituents:

Show appreciation, if an employee has done well. Successful organizations have developed recognition programs that publicly acknowledge employees who go above and beyond their job duties. Rather than singling out one employee with an "Employee of the Month" kind of program, they more-often-than-not create a program that recognizes all employees who have improved their productivity. Organizations should follow the foot-step of successful and leading organisations. They should hold a quarterly general employee meeting to give certificates of recognition and gift cards to various employees for exemplary performance. Publicly recognizing employee performance makes employees feel appreciated for the work they do and ...