I was a huge David Letterman fan growing up. I would watch his late-night show with a fair amount of dedication, even videotape them back in the day (for those who remember VCR’s). Often the highlight of the program was his nightly top-ten list.
So as a tribute to the great David Letterman I am offering up my own top ten list.
I present the Top Ten ways to Disengage Your Employees. Paul could we have a little Top Ten music please……
10) Be late to a meeting
Nothing says others time is not valuable than showing up late.
Nothing is worse than showing up late to a meeting with a fresh cup of Starbucks. It says I was running late, but I value my caffeine over my relationship with you.
If you are late, which happens, just apologize or at least bring two cups of coffee.
9) Be a Jerk
This should be fairly obvious, but it is not. During my career I have witnessed and heard stories of leaders talking to their team in ways that really are not acceptable. You are really not impressing anyone except yourself if you talk down to your staff.
8) Listen, but Don’t Act
You say have an open-door policy and want to hear from employees. That is actually the easy part.
The hard part is actually following through on their concerns. Even if you can’t do anything about it, if the employee took the time to come to you, you owe it to them to let them know you looked into it.
7) Don’t Reply to Email
This is hard. Particularly when it feels like emails flood in daily by the hundreds.
If an employee took time to send you an email with a concern or question, you should have the courtesy to respond. Even if it is a quick acknowledgement of the fact you read the email and will get back to them later.
Nothing makes an employee feel worse than an email that never gets a response.
6) Typing, Texting or Looking at your phone during a meeting.
This is an epidemic. Many meetings now have folks multitasking on phone and computers. This is frustrating to the person running the meeting as they don’t have your full attention. Often it results in repeating key points that have already been addressed.
Secondly, nothing is so important that it can’t wait 60 minutes for you to respond. If as a leader you use meetings to get other work done, then you probably need to look at your time management skills.
5) Avoiding Eye Contact (see #6)
If you are texting or looking at your phone when an employee is talking to you STOP. Your employees deserve your undivided attention. Your phone & text can wait.
4) Managing Data not People
It is so easy in our data saturated society to get so focused on KPI’s and spreadsheets that we often forget that there are people at the other end of all that data. It easy to manage to the spreadsheet and forget the person.
Always remember the person.
3) Interrupt
Have you ever been talking with someone and you know they aren’t listening but thinking ahead to what they are going to say next.
Be careful of non-verbal cues such as looking past the person, taking a slight breath in like your waiting to speak. Just relax, listen and respond when there is a natural pause in the conversation.
Never talk over someone!
2) Don’t Say Thank You
Newsflash!! All employees want to feel appreciated. Say Thank You frequently. A handwritten Thank You note can go a long way.
1) Ask them if they are engaged
There is now plenty of evidence to question the usefulness of annual employee engagement surveys. However, much like annual performance evaluations most corporations still cling to these vestiges of the past.
Experts tend to agree that engagement surveys are not helpful as they often shine the light on issues companies can’t do much about. There are a couple common reasons why these surveys are not generally beneficial.
First, Companies invest more in the actual survey than they do in actually changing the employee experience. Remember these surveys are products sold by third party vendors. These vendors have a goal to have corporations purchase their survey. If a company fixes engagement there is less of a need for the survey.
Nothing disengages employees more than pointing out the same problems year after year only to have nothing change. In this case they just stop filling out the survery.
Secondly, there is no commonly agree upon definition of employee engagement. So companies are often measuring something they aren’t quite sure how to define.
Engagement means different things to different employees. If the leaders of a company can’t define it then the employees are going to have difficulty.
It would be similar to a doctor ordering a test, but not quite sure how to define what she is trying to diagnose. You can’t treat it if you don’t know what it is.
So there you have it, my top ten list on how to disengage your employees. I hopefully paid a tribute to Mr. Letterman and maybe you learned something along the way.