Disengaged Employees? How Will This Affect Your Clients?
How engaged are your people?
One of the acid tests of engagement is creativity. If your people are fully engaged in achieving something, they are naturally inspired and naturally creative! If they are engaged, they can't help but generate all kinds of new ideas. If they are engaged with your clients' objectives, they'll naturally come up with multiple ways that they can help them. And your clients will be inspired by their degree of engagement.
What do you do when you have disengaged employees? Most managers ignore them, hoping the disengagement will work itself out. Don't do this!
If members of your team are not fully engaged, they will inevitably sap the morale of other employees and damage your customer relationships. Often this is done unwittingly. Sometimes it is done deliberately. Disengagement can be the tip of an iceberg of internal resentment. Something may have happened that has hurt their feelings. Deliberately or not, it won't be long before your entire team is operating below its potential. A general malaise will set in, customers and prospects will sense it, and over time begin to drift away.
What can you do? I recommend these 5 simple steps:
1) Have a heart-to-heart talk with your employee. Make sure they feel safe and they are not on the defensive. Point out specific behaviours you've observed and your concern at the apparent lack of engagement. Ask them to share their thoughts on the matter to help you understand what is happening.
2) Express genuine concern for them and ask them if they are clear on their personal goals. If they have lost their way, ask them to take some time out to get clear on what they want in their life. Ideally, their goals should be written down and they should develop a vision board, which displays images of all the things they want or aspire to.
3) Once they are clear on what they want, ask them if working with you still makes sense, and if so, if they can explain why.
4) Share your goals with them and show them how they fit in. Let them know that you're in the business of helping your clients achieve their goals and in exchange, that's how you achieve your goals. Let them know that you will commit to helping them achieve their goals in return for them helping you to attain your goals. Get them to commit to their goals and yours in writing. Schedule times to check in with each other and report on progress.
5) Watch for creativity. Once they are re-engaged, they will automatically be creative. Instead of just complaining, they will come to you with options and ideas. You will feel their energy and so will your customers.
Business is so much more fulfilling when we commit to helping others achieve their dreams and aspirations. If we are only wrapped up in our own goals, we become insensitive to others. Let's commit to only doing business that is win-win-win (customers, employees, owners). In so doing, we will build economic engines that can't help but go from strength to strength.