Learn how to increase employee engagement and performance with a simple approach that fosters emotional connections, encourages improvement, and taps into employees’ potential. This method can transform your workplace culture and help your employees achieve their full potential.
Gallup conducted an annual survey on employee engagement: if you are an average company, only one-third of your employees are actively engaged – and that proportion is falling.
Here are three questions you can ask employees as you meet them in their day-to-day environment to promote engagement and higher performance.
1. Are you having a good day?
This serves a dual purpose. First, it builds an emotional connection and cultivates belonging and self-worth. Second, it provides insights into the challenges they may be experiencing and their understanding of performance. For example, in a production environment, they may say:
a) Not bad, although we don’t seem to be as busy as usual
b) We should have produced 450 sub-assemblies by noon and are running at 400.
We like (b) as it shows they understand performance well. If employees can’t articulate the difference between a good day and a bad day, how will they improve?
2. What will you do differently tomorrow to have a better day than today?
This one probes for cause and effect understanding. The more highly engaged, the more they think about improving. If they are frustrated and can’t articulate how it might improve, they will become disengaged, disenfranchised, and demoralized.
Consider the difference in these two answers and which would you prefer was true:
a) I hope my line starts on time, so we don’t have the usual startup problems when I come on shift.
b) We are working on kitting the parts so everything will be ready for startup.
3. If you were the CEO, what would you do differently?
Some of the most considerable improvement potentials lies in the minds of your employees. It just needs to be teased out. Ask this questions, and you will be amazed at what you learn.
