Haris Ahmed of Chicago: Top 5 Ways to Engage Employees Effectively

Haris Ahmed, a Chicago consultant, executive coach, and founder and CEO of Pragmatium Consulting Group, Inc. has helped numerous organizations transform for the better. In today’s blog, he talks about the importance of employee engagement and how it can be expressed in their workplace.

These days, talk of employee engagement is no longer limited to the HR. Now more than ever, managers and executives are compelled to change the way they think about employee engagement if they ever want to reach goals or be successful. Here are five ways to engage employees:

1. Empower employees – Empowerment can mean different things to people. This means that the different ways leaders choose to express empowerment may not always translate well to employees. Generally though, there are a few unspoken ways to carry this out in the work place, like allowing employees to make decisions and avoiding micromanagement, which can cast self-doubt among employees over their potential. Empower your employees; you’d be surprised at how much they can accomplish.

2. Be empathetic – Make no mistake; empathy can’t be faked. However, this doesn’t mean leaders can’t go a notch “below” empathy and be sympathetic or understanding to the best of their abilities. During times of conflict, the least a leader can do is to try to understand where another is coming from by putting themselves in that person’s position. Doing so is already an exercise of empathy, in fact, which can go a long way in conflict resolution.

3. Give credit where it is due – We’ve all heard of the story of the manager who took all the credit, leaving his/her team high and dry. Simply put, don’t be that manager. A true leader will not hesitate to give credit where it is due, and extend recognition and praise when it is warranted. They don’t care about looking good as much as they do about helping their team feel assured and confident about their respective abilities. Praising employees can also do wonders for their motivation.

4. Create a sense of belonging – It’s rather ironic that employees should later feel they don’t belong in an organization when, during the recruitment process, HR officers and managers already evaluate their “fit” in the company. If you’re working with millennials especially, who will make up a majority of the workforce, creating a sense of belonging is what will help keep them loyal down the line. This sense of belonging could be a shared purpose or vision, which is one of the keys to employee engagement.

5. Establish mutually beneficial relationships – If you look at the biggest and most valuable companies, you’ll see that their people make up the backbone of their success. Mutually beneficial relationships aren’t some trend or gimmick either, but a very real and effective solution to driving employee engagement. One example of a mutually beneficial relationship is the employee that has leeway to work from home, which saves them time and money. Employees who work from home benefits employers as well, as they are proven to be more productive and less stressed.

For more thought pieces on leadership, stay tuned to this blog by Haris Ahmed, a Chicago consultant at Pragmatium Consulting Group, Inc. since 2009.