How to Empower Managers for Effective Employee Engagement?

Every Company focuses on empowering their employees. With the advent of modern performance management initiatives, employee welfare and employee engagement are being taken much care of. Speaking about an employee’s performance, along with many other factors that influence in the workplace, the main influencer is the manager of that particular employee.

Managers are the driving force of the team. For better or for worse, they do have a direct powerful impact on their employees and their performance levels. Managers of a company work directly with the employees, monitor them and evaluate their performances. They can implement changes and can demonstrate on how a leader has to be, by listening to the team and making strategies for their development. Managers are the ones that drive a company through its course.

There’s a powerful link between the manager’s effectiveness and behavior in the work place and the employee engagement of the company that leads to their performance and retention.

We usually think about empowering the employees in a company. But before that, did we check if our managers are planning a good role in the process of action planning?

Empowering Managers

Isn’t it unfair and unreasonable to hold managers accountable for their behaviors on what they haven’t been trained for? Every company has great reliance on the capabilities of their managers regarding their work, their feedback and the decisions they make. Before inviting a manager to join the company, the top management should have more clarity on what their roles are and should give clear description to them, ensuring their capabilities.

Communication between the management and the managers should be clear enough that the transfer of orders would be hassle-free. In this modern world, the employee engagement is measured and improved by using the employee engagement tools. Wellness hub offers EWA – Employee Wellness Audit, a powerful tool which gives a complete solution for employee betterment as well as organizational development through surveys, and psychometric assessments offering psychological counseling and wellness interventions.

Managers handling the surveys and assessments should be made clear on their job description if they top management allows the data and access to them. The things about accessing data, submitting action plans, approach of action plan, notifying the management etc. should be made clear to the people manager or the HR manager handling this. The managers should be educated on both the tactical and philosophical approaches of the programs conducted.

How to Do?

The managers should be informed on how to engage the employees, how to interact and how to receive the feedback and how to respond to their issues. The managers can be empowered with this knowledge through a training program on sending surveys, accessing reports, preparing action plans, their role in implementing those plans etc. We are here to train your managers on these issues and to extend our help in maintaining the tasks.

Our round-the-clock availability to solve the issues helps the management to keep the process going. After sending the surveys, identifying high-impact questions and sending similar ones for more clarity on what to do can get you more information on what is lacking.

EWA has both pre-designed questionnaire and an option to customize your question, according to your choice. EWA team offers to have a one-to-one meeting with the manager to ensure they are confident to take up action on their own. Notifying the top management about the changes implemented helps to take any further decisions.

What and Why?

Surveying gets you the information required while taking a planned action lets you have the benefits of the surveys conducted. To acquire such results, the managers are empowered by suggestions from EWA to implement actions that guarantee good results. Through this process, the top management lets the managers understand that the employees are the real members of the community and they should have real employee experience. Emphasizing this fact saying it to the employees also motivates them and improves their level of engagement and commitment.

The managers of a company can be empowered through offering training on their roles and responsibilities, by not only supporting but also on providing them with additional resources, education and training, and other things. A two-way communication is essential between the top management and the managers to ensure a better output. At Wellness hub, we make the employee engagement easy with EWA, by helping managers on facing challenges and solving the problems they encounter during this process. We help them understand by providing them one-to-one coaching.

Scope for Improvement

In the process of empowering their team, the managers also refine themselves. Once the managers take the feedback, they learn on how to improve the status of the employees. Show your employees that it’s okay to fail and learn on what and how it needs to be done. Take time to reflect on the aspects that worked in engaging the employees and that failed. Check how can we think, educate and listen more or maybe in a different way.

To determine if the action plans are having an impact, use your survey tools. Run a pulse survey customizing a quick question to gather the feedback on the action plan implemented. With the result, you will know if you have to continue implementing it, if you have to enhance it further or if you can give it a break and try something new.

Reciprocate

Improvement in employees’ performance shows the capabilities of the manager. In order to enhance the performance of the manager, the top management can plan to collect a feedback on the performance of the manager from the employees. EWA’s 180-degree and 360-degree feedback processes come under this category. Along with the managers of other sections, if the employees that work under this particular manager also provide feedback, then a lot can be understood and the scope of improvement can be assessed.

The characteristics of the manager’s effectiveness should align with their company’s vision, mission, goals and needs. Also, ask the managers to rank their higher officials and then give their reports on how they were ranked on a scale of points. Receiving the feedback gives the managers an insight on how their actions are perceived by others. Let the managers debrief about the feedback to the team so that the manager feels accountable and the team also feels considerate that the manager cares about their needs and personal growth.

This two-fold advantage boosts the communication between the employees of the whole organization, increasing employee satisfaction and retention and thus improving the employee engagement to a greater level. EWA facilitates you with such great options of improving the overall company’s performance and enhancing the employee engagement at all the levels in the company. By working together, we can be one step ahead in improving employee engagement in your organization.