Your employees have glazed looks. They’re practically sleepwalking. They seem to be doing the bare minimum to get through the week. If you’re a manager and you want to get your employees engaged in the workplace, you should make these three changes:
Push Them Toward Meaningful Tasks:
Researchers have found that employees would take a 32% pay cut as long as they got to do meaningful work — this means that people value the quality of their work much higher than their salary. A good salary isn’t the only incentive you should offer employees. If they feel unfulfilled, they will look for another job.
Think about the tasks that you’re giving them. Are they repetitive? Are they dull? Could they be completed in another way?
For instance, you have one staff member comb through analytics about your official website, recording data like the number of website visitors. It can be a time-consuming and tedious task to complete regularly.
Instead of getting your employee to complete this task, you should turn to a digital marketing reporting, analysis and insights dashboard like Morphio to do the job for them. Click here to see how the right dashboard can help you thoroughly comb through your data metrics, analyze them and provide relevant reports on the results. Since Morphio is an AI-driven platform, you will eliminate the risks of human error and bias.
More importantly, you need to give your employees the freedom to complete other tasks that are far more creative and engaging. They can forge better relationships with clients or come up with ideas for the team. They can do something that they find meaningful at the office.
Put a Cap on Meetings:
It’s important to touch base with your employees, but you have to ask yourself if you’re holding too many meetings and catch-up sessions every single week. A schedule full of meetings means that workers are consistently pulled away from their tasks. In a sense, meetings that encourage productivity are taking away time and energy to be productive.
Here is how you can fix this problem:
- Include employees in meetings that they can actively participate in.
- Set strict limits for the number of meetings employees can attend in a week.
- Set time restrictions for meeting runtimes.
- If you can condense the message of a meeting into an email, do that instead.
Make the Workspace Nicer:
Employees will be affected by the atmosphere they work in. Something as simple as bad lighting will do more than make the office look drab — it can sap energy and focus from workers. Let in natural sunlight and provide desk lamps with bright bulbs.
Other small touches can make a big difference:
- Put out potted plants.
- Hang colorful artwork on the walls.
- Encourage employees to decorate their desks.
Before you ask yourself if your employees are slacking, ask if you’re making sure they’re engaged. When you replace dull tasks with meaningful ones, trim down meetings and spruce up the office, they will be energized when they come into work and sit down at their desks.
