A key factor for your business to succeed is to know how to manage your team and keep them engaged every single day they are working.
You want to aim to be a manager who influences their employees to be proud of what they do and to be passionate every day they are working with you. According to a study, nearly 30% of employees claimed that their managers lack the proper management skills.
So, if you are already working as a manager, you need to take some time and get to know your employees before you start evaluating them. Gathering the necessary knowledge of their backgrounds is essential to keep them engaged and give them a positive perspective on the project you are working on.
Well, that’s not all; let’s find out the best tips you can follow to keep your team engaged and manage them in the most effective way possible!
What is the effective way of managing a team?
First of all, we want to clarify that keeping your employees engaged is more than just appreciating their work. Measure their engagement rate by seeing how committed they are to the business and its overall success. Emotions play a huge role here, so you have to pay attention to their emotional state as well.
As a manager, you need to motivate your employees to have a goal that is perpendicular to the company’s vision. This way, they are committed to the business and have an in-depth understanding of what they are working for.
Employees who have the highest level of engagement are the ones who feel that their managers are giving them a direction on what they are doing in addition to giving them the proper feedback. In short, the manager and the employee both get along this way and can create better synergy when they are working together.
Best tips for achieving excellent team management
With the proper feedback and communication, you can provide your team with solid support. That way, team leaders are developing trust, accountability, and synergy with each other.
Here are our best tips for achieving excellent team management that will keep your employees engaged.
Be approachable
Don’t be the grumpy person in the room, where you are always harping on about the mistakes your team made and making them scared to say anything to you. This is a huge issue many team members go through, and it isn’t pleasant. By doing this, you are only pushing your team away from feeling comfortable talking to you.
The best option is to be friendly, open to conversations, and even ask your team how they feel from time to time, and what they think can be better. Aim to look more like a leader than someone trying to tell others what to do. When your team sees you as a friendly manager who doesn’t want things to go their way all the time, they will feel more comfortable approaching you for any problem. That is how you become an approachable person.
Appreciate your team
It costs nothing to say “good job,” “great work,” or “you are doing excellent” to your team members. Nothing will make a team more disengaged than never saying a “thank you” to them or appreciating their work.
According to Forbes, about 70% of employees are disengaged in the workplace because of several factors. Lack of appreciation is a huge factor that directly impacts their motivation to feel engaged. Additionally, 79% also claimed that they quit their job because of a lack of appreciation.
Recognition comes in words but can also include a bonus, a gift matching program, awards, or even simply congratulating your team members. However, never make yourself look like you favor one team member over the other. This will only cause even more issues including hatred and jealousy between team members.
Leverage donation matching
Donation matching is when a business matches the number of donations made by an employee. This allows employees’ contributions to have a direct impact. With donation matching, we are directly referring to financial contributions that are made.
Donation matching is done for non-profit organizations and is excellent for engaging employees as it can help many people and increase overall revenue. If you want to learn more, then Alaya covers all you need to know about donation matching.
Educate
If you want to do your team members a favor, seek to educate them on self-development and skills they can enhance when working. There are team members who may have still not found their goals in life, and now is your chance to teach them how they can find them.
Moreover, by educating your team members, you motivate and engage them to work towards their goals directly. For example, you could tell them where the company wants to be in five years and how they could directly contribute to achieving this. This can even make team members feel good outside the workplace because what you do with passion never gets boring even when you aren’t working.
Encourage teamwork
We can never achieve anything by ourselves, so if you want to manage a business team successfully, you need to make sure your team members are getting along with one another.
In order to achieve this, encourage teamwork and collaboration between members. Each team member will have their own set of skills. The vital part is that everyone can collaborate by contributing their skills to achieve the goals and objectives of the business.
39% of teams around the world lack collaboration, and this is a bad indicator. Let’s assume you have a copywriter and a marketing specialist on your team. They are both parts of the same industry, but the copywriter needs to write the text, and the marketing specialist needs to promote them. Neither of the two can do it all on their own.
Trust your team
A Harvard business review survey revealed that 58% of employees said they trust a stranger more than they would trust their managers. That is quite a considerable percentage, and this comes from managers who don’t deliver their promises and fail to trust their team. Usually, you can call managers like these ‘control freaks,’ something you don’t want to be.
Businesses will hire employees for a reason, so if you can’t trust them to get the job done, then you should blame yourself for making the wrong hire. Allow team members to manage their own time and leave the job up to them; if you know who you hired, then you have to put your trust in them too.
Offer flexible schedules
Productivity rates will differ for everyone. Each team member will be productive at different times in the day. For some, it may be at night, and for some in the morning. The best thing you can do as a manager is to offer flexibility in schedules. Don’t be that 9-5 guy who only believes productivity is achieved during this time period.
Flexible schedules directly impact your team members in the following ways:
- Improves productivity
- Increases employee engagement
- Lowers employee burnout and stress levels
- Improves retention and much more
In fact, a survey done by Airtasker claimed that team members with flexible schedules actually work 40% more than those working with the traditional 9-5 work schedule.
Set up team activities
Being a good manager doesn’t just mean being a good one in the workplace. You need to focus on being great outside the office as well. Try gathering people together after work, organizing events, and even having happy hours to improve collaboration and engagement.
You should put the health of your team members above everything else, so the best thing you can do is to keep them mentally healthy and help them feel great whenever they work with you. After all, the health of your business depends on the health of your team members.
Wrapping it up
Well, that’s about it for this article. These were our tips for managing your team and keeping them engaged. Hopefully, it has presented you with many new methods you can use to increase team engagement and manage team members better.
This article shows you in-depth research on what demotivates employees, what to do, and what to avoid doing with them. We recommend that you carefully read each tip we stated and seek to implement it in your daily management activities.
Use all the resources and leadership skills you have in order to improve your overall management skills. We aren’t living in the traditional marketing world anymore, so what used to work once in traditional management won’t work today. Your team shouldn’t only be important during work hours. Rather, they should think of you as someone they can count on at all times.