Creating a Properly Structured Vision

A well formulated vision is critical to the success of your company, and it is essential to your ability to achieve effective employee engagement. In fact, creating your vision should always be the first step in the process of implementing an employee engagement plan.

A properly structured vision is important for several reasons:

• It provides the context for strategic and tactical decisions
• It forms the basis of extraordinary human effort
• It creates cohesion, teamwork and community
• It lays the groundwork for your business to evolve past dependence on a few key individuals

There are three important components to your company vision:

• Purpose – Your purpose is the foundational reason for your company’s existence. It grows out of your core values and serves as a guiding star you are always working towards.
• Core Values – Your core values are a system of guiding principles and tenets that drive everything you do as an organization. They are an extension of the personal core values and beliefs of your company’s leadership team.
• Mission Numbers – These are specifically defined timelines and milestones you’re trying to achieve as a company. Your mission numbers should identify a path for ongoing growth and success, and they should include your target goals for sales numbers, number of customers, number of employees, and your organizational chart.

Learn how to create a shared vision that guides your leadership team and improves employee engagement.

Engaging Your Team with Your Vision

Once you’ve established your vision, it’s important to communicate the vision to your team to ensure everyone is aligned with it. This is essential to achieving effective employee engagement. When your employees understand and connect with your vision, it gives their work a greater sense of purpose beyond just completing their daily tasks. When your team feels that their efforts contribute to a larger, meaningful goal, it fosters greater levels of engagement and motivation.

Engaging your team with your vision provides several other important benefits:

• Aligns their efforts towards achieving your organizational goals and objectives
• Creates an emotional connection and commitment to your company
• Makes it easier for employees to embrace changes or new initiatives that support your vision
• Improves employee satisfaction and retention

Learn how to engage your team with your company vision.

Establishing an Effective Success Rhythm

Your company’s success rhythm refers to the cyclical patterns, routines and cadences that drive the alignment, execution and progress towards your strategic vision and goals. Your success rhythm provides the check-ins and routines necessary to keep initiatives moving forward and drive accountability. It also helps your leadership team provide clarity on expectations, responsibilities and next steps for each employee on your team.

Some essential components to an effective success rhythm include:

• Regular employee one-on-one meetings with your leadership team
• Monthly relationship check-ins
• All-company quarterly and annual planning meetings

Discover the key elements to a business success rhythm.

Developing Key Success Metrics

Success metrics, commonly called key performance indicators (KPIs), refer to quantifiable measurements that your business uses to track and evaluate your performance against your strategic goals and objectives. The specific metrics you choose will be specific to your company’s industry, size, goals and strategic priorities.

It’s important to create success metrics that are specific to the overall company as well as for each individual employee. When you regularly monitor your success metrics, it provides important insights into your company’s performance, helps identify areas for improvement, and facilitates data-driven decisions that will help drive company success.

Learn how to determine the right success metrics for your business.

Cultivating Trust and Respect with Your Team

Cultivating trust and respect with your team plays a critical role in improving employee engagement:

• It fosters a psychologically safe environment where employees feel comfortable sharing ideas, asking questions, admitting mistakes, taking calculated risks, and being innovative.
• It builds emotional connection and commitment that is essential for your employees to feel valued and cared about. This creates emotional investment that leads to deeper engagement in their work.
• It creates a greater sense of empowerment and autonomy among your employees that increases motivation, accountability, productivity and overall engagement in their job.
• It promotes open communication and collaboration that allows for more diverse perspectives to be heard and fosters a more cohesive, unified culture.

Learn how to build a company culture based on trust and respect.

Defining Roles and Accountabilities for Team Members

In order to have effective employee engagement, you must also define specific roles and accountabilities for each team member. This improves engagement in a variety of ways:

• It provides each team member with clarity regarding what is expected of them and what they are accountable for delivering. This eliminates confusion, fosters a greater sense of ownership and allows employees to focus their efforts more effectively.
• It allows you to align each role with the individual strengths, interests and motivations of each team member. This helps employees feel like their unique talents are valued and leveraged effectively, which improves overall job satisfaction.
• It creates a heightened sense of personal responsibility for outcomes associated with their work and motivates employees to see tasks through to completion.
• It provides clear benchmarks for evaluating employee performance objectively, delivering constructive feedback and coaching, and recognizing employees for valuable contributions that move the company forward.

Creating Structure and Clarity of Processes

Establishing structured and clear processes allow employees to be optimally engaged in their work:

• It provides greater clarity in the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for each team member, eliminating confusion over what’s expected of them.
• It facilitates more effective coordination between teams and individuals. This prevents the overlap, gaps and misalignment that can lead to employee frustration.
• It provides employees with the context to make decisions more autonomously within defined boundaries.
• It eliminates redundancies, bottlenecks and unnecessary steps that can lead to employee burnout and frustration.
• It creates visibility into areas for potential improvement, giving employees a voice and making it easier for them to contribute ideas that will optimize performance.
• It provides transparency into how individual efforts collectively drive progress towards broader company goals.

Hiring Based on Core Values

While it’s critical for any candidate you hire to possess the skills and experience required of the role, this alone isn’t sufficient to ensure success. For an employee to thrive at your company, they must also be a good fit for your culture. In fact, cultural fit is often a greater predictor of employee success than any hard skills they possess.

The best way to ensure you hire people who are a fit for your company culture is to implement a hiring process that prioritizes your core values. When your employees share your company’s core values, it creates a more cohesive team that will have better collaboration. This will create a positive workplace dynamic that improves employee engagement.

Onboarding Based on Core Values

Hiring employees who share your company’s values is an important first step, but it’s also critical to make your team understand that these values are authentic. To accomplish this, you should also develop your onboarding process based on your core values. When your onboarding process reinforces your core values, it will improve employee engagement in a variety of ways:

• It fosters a sense of purpose and belonging from the beginning of each employee’s tenure at your company.
• It promotes cultural fit and increases the likelihood employees will feel committed to your company long term.
• It reinforces desired behaviors and norms, facilitating the integration of new team members into your company culture.
• It keeps your core values top-of-mind for all employees.
• It helps cultivate trust and a sense of psychological safety among new hires who share your values.

Managing Based on Core Values

The reinforcement of your core values can’t stop after team members have been successfully onboarded. If you want to create an engaged team that truly aligns with your core values and lives them each day, they must play a pervasive role in your operations. This means your leadership team must manage based on these core values as well.

When your leadership team manages based on core values, it shows your employees that you do more than pay lip service to these values. It makes them more authentic and helps team members feel a greater connection to your company. This will create a more engaged and inspired team.

One-on-Ones Focused on Coaching, Leadership and Management (CLM)

An important component to cultivating strong employee engagement is creating a personal connection between your leadership team and the employees they manage. Scheduling regular one-on-one meetings between employees and leadership plays a critical role in fostering these connections, allowing team members to build a personal rapport with your company’s leaders. This helps nurture a culture of belonging where employees feel valued and their voice matters.

These one-on-one meetings should focus on three critical areas:

• Coaching – Understanding your team members’ specific goals and helping them achieve them (these are more personal goals for what they want out of life than career-specific goals)
• Leadership – Reviewing the company vision and progress with each team member
• Management – Candidly assessing each team member’s individual performance

Cultivating an Authentic Culture

Your company culture refers to the shared norms and expectations regarding how things are done at your business. It’s driven by your company’s purpose, core values and visions. Your culture encompasses a wide range of items, including:

• The beliefs your team possesses
• The ways in which your team communicates with each other and with your customers/clients
• The dress code at your office
• How accomplishments are recognized
• How team members are able to share ideas and feedback with one another

Your company culture plays an integral role in creating an engaged team. Your culture impacts the extent to which your employees feel valued, their motivation to do their best work, and the level of trust they feel with your leadership team. When you cultivate an authentic culture that aligns with your company’s core values, your employees will be more engaged, experience greater job satisfaction and are more likely to remain loyal.

Creating Opportunities for Employee Growth and Development

Maintaining an engaged team involves more than cultivating a strong, values-based culture and creating alignment and clarity on company goals. Your employees need to feel valued and fulfilled in their job. They need to feel like your company is invested in their personal and career growth. If they don’t receive this investment from you, why should they remain invested in the ongoing success of your company?

One of the most important ways you can invest in the success of your employees is to create opportunities for professional growth and development. These opportunities should include avenues for upward advancement within your organization. Offering professional development opportunities will demonstrate your commitment to your employees, provide motivating challenges and create a clear path to career advancement. When these opportunities exist, you’ll experience significantly higher levels of employee engagement.