The new year is here and it’s time to “circle back,” reset, and reengage with your teams for 2023.
To help you kick off the year on the right foot, here are eleven ways to keep employees motivated and engaged in the year ahead:
1. Support Individual Goals: Encourage managers to sit down with their team members individually to talk about their professional and personal development goals. With more information about their team, managers can deepen interpersonal connections and recommend specific conferences, projects, courses, and mentors that are the backbone of strong professional development plans.
2. Set Team Resolutions: Ease the stress of getting back on track after the holidays by coming together as a team to clarify your goals. Plan to discuss team resolutions that can be achieved together and lay out your project plans for the spring.
3. Celebrate Your Staff: Make it a priority to ensure employees feel recognized and valued. Plan to celebrate personal and professional milestones and achievements: birthdays, the birth of a child, work anniversaries, completion of a long-term project, etc. When staff feel that their organization cares about their personal well-being as well as their professional development, they feel connected to the business and engage as active members of the community.
4. Develop Feedback Processes: To engage your employees, you need to engage with them by creating a safe space for dialogue and feedback. You can start with anonymous employee engagement surveys as a method for collecting feedback, but expand on that with one-on-one feedback sessions and office hours with senior leaders. Creating space for conversation, and then transparently sharing how you will act on feedback, builds trust.
5. Support Pay Transparency: Your employees want to feel valued, and that means ensuring their voices are heard and providing fair compensation to support their lives outside of the office. Create transparency in the salary review process and share ranges for job functions and levels to empower employees when approaching salary discussions.
6. Resource ERGs: Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are an important tool in helping employees feel connected and supported at work. However, ERG leaders are often faced with a daunting task of creating impactful programming with a very limited budget. Assess how you are going to fund your ERGs for the year ahead to ensure that ERGs leaders are compensated for their extra work and initiatives can successfully move forward.
7. Promote Wellness: Health and wellness ease stress and promote increased productivity. You can foster mental health care by setting boundaries around after-hours emails, providing access to a meditation tool, and setting norms around mental health days. To promote physical wellness, try a Wellness Wednesday initiative where staff are provided the time off to take an exercise class or share a healthy lunch together.
8. Make Meetings Engaging: Meetings can be a great way to engage your employees beyond checking items off an agenda. Change up the scenery and take a meeting outside, create time for shout outs of gratitude or celebration, or use the time for professional development.
9. Create Cross Collaboration Opportunities: Create formal processes through which team members can shadow another colleague for a day or attend meetings run by other teams. When staff see the “big picture” of what your organization is trying to accomplish, they can identify opportunities for innovation, internal mobility, and network building.
10. Sponsor a Volunteer Day: Provide the office a day of paid time to volunteer at a charity of their choice. Give back to your community while showing employees how your company values are lived out and creating an opportunity for staff to participate in building that culture.
11. Be flexible: A final way to engage staff is to show your trust through flexible work arrangements. Whether that means allowing for non-traditional work hours or options to work from home at least some of the time, building trust among employees promotes engagement and productivity.
