A Plan for Employee Engagement

Some time ago, I became slightly obsessed with the notion that the one-thousandth day on a job should be just as exciting as the first. Why? Because, that’s typically not the reality for most employees I engage with either in churches or otherwise. So, I set out on a mission to try and solve the dilemma.

First, let’s look at the underlying issues. Have you ever know someone who was thrilled to get a job offer letter that they practically jumped out of their shoes only to find out that within a year or two they were completely dejected about their job? Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself, I know I have.

How does it happen? I believe the answer is twofold. Even with the best of intentions, as organizational leaders we have a tendency to promise the sun, the moon, and the stars, when in fact what we end up delivering is a miscalibrated telescope. Then we scratch our heads when our staff becomes frustrated. The second is, we’re not doing the right things to engage our staff. According to Gallup, roughly 32% of employees in the United States are engaged in their jobs. Most of your employees will embrace the challenges that come with the bum telescope so long as you give them to tools and the resources to get it right, we have to engage them through development.

What does that look like?

Here are three key steps you can take as a leader at very specific times to effectively engage and develop your employees.

Year 1: Organizational alignment

It starts right away. This is when both the leader and the employee need to be asking a lot of questions. Not just the questions that come with performance reviews like job goals and performance metrics. These are important, but there needs to be more. This is where you want to assess organizational alignment and alignment with the bigger mission and vision. This simply can’t be done in whole in the interview process, so it’s important to make this a priority early.

Year 3: Individual vision casting

This is where you want to start talking about some long-term plans together. You’ve been courting one another for a while, but now it’s time to get serious. This doesn’t mean the promise of a new title or promotion. What I’m talking about is doing individual vision casting. If the organizational alignment piece is there, this opens up a two-way dialogue so you can actually assess what the staff member wants and where they want to go, not just what you need as a leader from a staff member. Why is year three so important? The average job tenure for employees age 25-34 is 2.8 years. These people are talented; do you want them to be your talent or someone else’s?

Year 5: Mutual long-term commitment

At this point the staff member should become part of your succession plan for the organization to some degree depending on their role, potential leadership ceiling, etc. This is where they will need more of your time, energy, and resources. Not that they shouldn’t have been getting these things all along, but if you both agree there is the potential for a long-term future together, you need to ramp these efforts up to the next level at this stage. The more of these you can get, the more confidence you can have in your succession plan.

The most common piece of pushback I hear when it comes to employee development is, “what if I develop them and they leave?” To which the quippy retort was invented, “what if you don’t and they stay?” I prescribe to this in theory, but clearly it hasn’t alleviated too many fears. Otherwise, people would have stopped asking the first question by now. There is risk mitigation in the process laid out here. It provides ways to keep your employees engaged well beyond the onboarding process and it has better potential to keep them working to build a better telescope than the one they inherited when they started.