A Gallup poll released last week shows that employee engagement is at a 10-year low in the United States. Only 31% of employees are actively engaged, and 17% are actively disengaged. That’s fewer than 1 in 3 employees who actually care. The rest are going through the motions. Think about what that means for your clients. They know when the person on the other end of the phone or email truly care or not.
Having an engaged workforce is a differentiator in today’s MSP market. Word of mouth is still a significant source of new business for most MSPs, which means exceptional service can separate you from the pack. The easiest way to deliver exceptional service is to have highly engaged employees.
Here’s what you can do to foster a highly engaged workforce.
Set Clear Expectations
Fewer than half of employees have a clear sense of expectations at work. Someone without a clear sense of expectations doesn’t truly understand what success looks like. Engagement is higher when employees know what they need to do in order to succeed, be recognized, and build a great career for themselves. The best way to set clear expectations is to write them down, and communicate about them regularly. If regular 1:1 meetings with an agenda about goals and metrics aren’t part of your operations today, they need to be.
You Have to Care
You, and every single member of your leadership team, has to care about your employees. If you’re promoting leaders based on technical skills, you may need to train them on listening, emotional intelligence, empathy, and other soft skills that make for truly great leadership. But some of caring comes from within – it’s not enough to ask people questions about their needs, you have to actual want to hear the answers.
Encourage Growth
The growth mindset benefits everybody. Often times, this is something leaders forget – especially if they are focused on basic performance numbers. But you can build growth into your scorecards. Set goals for courses taken, certifications acquired, or books read. Put those goals on your employee’s scorecards. And then double down on the growth mindset by asking your team members to assume that the company is going to grow, and get them envision where they might want to be when that growth occurs. The status quo is a source of comfort, and growth isn’t comfortable, so to get people out of the status quo mindset and into a growth mindset, you have to make a growth mindset part of the organizational culture, which means measuring, talking about it, and actively encouraging it.
The Gallup survey highlights something that should be obvious, but often is overlooked, that employee engagement will not happen on its own. Employee engagement must be fostered actively. That’s why we build Team GPS, to give you a tool for employee engagement, and it’s why I run leadership training for MSPs, to help leaders become better leaders, for the benefit of your entire company.
This is also why we run Build IT Briefs seminars every two weeks – to help you and your team reach your fullest potential.
You can sign up for the next Build IT Brief here
