Look, I know you get it. Disengaged employees are more likely to leave your organization – which means that you as a people leader want to create full engagement, especially with your top talent. You want to make sure that they are engaged in the work that they’re doing, that they are bought into the organization. So how do we go about doing that?
Well, let’s first address that compensation must be deemed fair. For the employees, they’ve got to feel that they’re at least being compensated at a good rate, right? If compensation is too low, that’s the very first thing we need to address. So, let’s assume compensation is deemed fair by the employee. Then you don’t need to rely on perks.
In fact, I just talked about this in a video recently – that we don’t need to rely on perks. If compensation’s fair, these big bonuses and fun rooms and all these other little shiny things really aren’t going to create true engagement that’s going to retain your talent. Don’t rely on the perks. So, we’ve got fair compensation, we don’t need to rely on all the perks, now let’s take it back to the basics.
The foundation that I want to give you is to lead with humanity.
That word, humanity. I mean, just remembering that day in and day out, you are working with a human being. “94482,” those were the last five digits of my employee ID number at my last corporate job, so I get it. I know that we need those identification numbers for confidentiality, for record-keeping, absolutely. But I never wanted to show up to work and have my manager treat me like a number, like an inanimate object.
Don’t do that for your employees. Treating a person like a number is an insult to their humanity. Make sure that you are acknowledging that every single person as a human being has their own past experiences, their own current experiences, their own thoughts, their own feelings, and their own emotions. They are legitimately unique individuals in every single circumstance. So by acknowledging that they are a human being, it’s going to set you up better as a leader to bring them in and see that you care about them.
Now, we are not aiming for popularity; we are aiming for impact.
I am not suggesting that you treat these human beings on your team as if you are best friends. We’re not looking for friendship in what that true word means, but you want to make sure that your team understands and sees that day in and day out, you care about them as a human being. Unfortunately, 59% of employees feel that their company cares more about the revenue than them as a person. Nearly 60%, that is absolutely inexcusable.
So it’s going to start with you as a people leader; get back in touch with the fact that each of these people are individual human beings. That’s going to help you build the foundation so that they know you as their leader truly care about them. And when they know you care about them, they’re going to be more engaged in their role from the start. All right, let’s start looking at people with true lens of humanity!