A Proven Employee Engagement Strategy
What can a Supervisor do to Engage Employees?
It's all about the relationship you have with your employees and below are the five-levels of the Supervisor/Employee relationship. Engagement is level-five.
The 1st level of the relationship that an employee is looking for is supervisor competency. For employees to be engaged, they need to feel like their supervisor is a an engaged and competent supervisor.
The 2nd relationship level that you need to develop is just plain old friendliness. This requires supervisors to be present and available. They need to walk the floor a couple times a day and say hello to your employees.
The 3rd level in the relationship is communication. Employees want to know the department and company goals and they want to see the on-going results. They want to have regular meetings and ideally these are daily meetings.
The 4th level in the employee/supervisor relationship is positive recognition. Employees need their supervisor to recognize and appreciate their work. It’s nice to recognize some stellar achievements, but really the day-to-day recognition of a job well done will engage employees as much as an employee of the month program will.
The 5th and final level of employee/supervisor relationship is engagement, and you can’t get here without the other four. Engagement looks like a partnership. When you partner with your employees, they will partner back. Although you have different roles, engagement represents an equal level of process ownership and job commitment.
At this level in the relationship:
- Ask operators for their input on process changes and improvements.
- Include them on project teams.
- Assign them individual projects and trust that they will deliver for you.
- When they succeed say “Thanks, nice job!”
- When they fail, give them encouraging and constructive feedback.
- When employees bring up issues, engage them in the solution.
- Give them time to work on continuous improvement projects.
- Include your operators on design reviews of capital projects.
- Respect their process knowledge and value their input.
At this 5th level, a supervisor will have regular discussions about the employee’s development plan, training needs and career aspirations. Formal training platforms need to be available for employees. If your company doesn’t have formal training packages, then just start with a checklist of training objectives for the employee. Once you agree on the objectives, then you can discuss the methods of acquiring the subject knowledge.
In a partnership relationship, open and honest information is required. Positive recognition is important, but everyone needs to hear the good, bad and ugly too. Don’t shield engaged employees from negative information or feedback. They’ll feel left out of key business information.
Kaizen events and process improvement teams are a great way to engage employees and improve the business. Supervisors can set up regular process improvement meetings and assign employees’ action items. While Kaizen events will make quicker improvements, process improvement teams can still make solid progress over a longer period of time. Both are great for employee engagement.
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