Being part of a busy HR team that supports a large organization comes with many challenges, including keeping the entire enterprise engaged. Employee engagement is critical, and it is everyone's responsibility in the organization. Managers are the front line to the workforce and connect the strategy to the execution to the people on the front lines. HR professionals must push employee engagement down as a core requirement of the manager's job. Here are five things HR can do to empower managers to drive employee engagement:
Provide managers with the right tools, including resourcing, training, and technology.
Embed employee engagement into the entire operation, making it a critical component of a manager's responsibility.
Encourage real conversations between managers and employees, giving regular feedback and holding ongoing discussions.
Empower and encourage creativity, allowing managers to experiment and try different approaches in pursuit of the goal.
HR must have their back and act as a consultant and support for managers.
To build an elite organization, you need empowered managers and an engaged workforce. HR teams must empower managers to drive positive impact on employee engagement by providing them with the right tools, embedding it in their responsibilities, encouraging real conversations, empowering creativity, and providing support. By doing so, HR teams can help their organizations achieve their objectives.
Timestamp
0:00:00
Challenges of being in a busy HR team
0:00:35
Line level managers must take an active role in employee engagement
0:02:07
Embed employee engagement into job descriptions and performance metrics
0:03:09
Real conversations with ongoing feedback and action
0:03:35
Encourage creativity in finding solutions
0:04:33
HR should act as consultants to support managers
0:05:09
The five steps to building an elite organization
0:05:09
Ensure you have the right tools, rules, and metrics in place
0:05:09
Have real conversations and act on them
0:05:09
Give space for creativity
0:05:09
Be an effective sounding board and consultant for managers
Transcripts
How Can Busy HR Teams Empower Managers_
Dr. Jim: [:
One of the constant challenges that you have to deal with as part of this team and as a leader of a busy HR team is keeping the entire enterprise engaged, and oftentimes this falls in your lap and it could be made a lot easier if. Line level managers took more of an active role in that effort. And here's the thing, the reason why line level managers don't take more of an active role in it is because a lot of it has to do with HR professionals not actually pushing this down as a core requirement of the job [00:01:00] of being a manager.
Employee engagement is critical, but it's not just hrs responsibility. It's actually everyone in the organization's responsibility, and your first line of execution in driving employee engagement up or down is. Your managers, they're the front line to the workforce.
They're the ones that connect the strategy to the execution, to the people on the front lines. So it becomes hrs responsibility to better empower them to boost engagement. So how do you actually do that? The, there's five things that you can do to. Empower managers to be more of an active player in driving employee engagement.
be effective in keeping your [:
Second, there's a perception that employee engagement is this, just this inner fuzzy stuff that HR cares about. The reality of it is that just like a lot of other initiatives, Keeping your workforce engaged and committed to the mission, vision values has to be an enterprise-wide responsibility.
And the only way that you make it actionable is by embedding it into the entire operations. And this has to be a critical component of a manager's responsibility. You need to make it count, make it clear, and you need to embed it in job descriptions and performance metrics. You're basically defining the North Star.
For managers so that they can be committed to delivering on the employee engagement requirements, that's gonna help you build an elite organization.
ave real conversations. This [:
You have to be able to hear and respond and be proactive based on all of those real conversations. Otherwise, it falls flat. That's how you actually build and engage workforce.
Fourth, you need to focus on empowering and encouraging creativity. There isn't a one size fits all solution to it, so you have to make sure that your managers know that they can experiment, test, and retest what's gonna work for their team.
you have an actively engaged [:
Last, and certainly not least when it comes to empowering managers, To help and support employee engagement. Part of that responsibility needs to include HR having their back. HR needs to be available as a sounding board, as their consultant, their support. And this requires a little bit of a shift in thinking, especially when you're talking about a Small to mid-size organization.
HR is often taking the role of an order taker and really the best performing HR organizations, each person on that team acts as a consultant. And the more you hit that consultant mindset, the better supportive you are of your managers being agents to drive employee engagement.
pporting large organizations [:
You need to make sure that you have the right tools.
You need to make sure that the right rules and metrics are in place. You need to make sure that. Real conversations are being had and acted upon. You need to make sure that you're giving space for creativity. And then lastly, you need to be an effective sounding board and consultant in order for managers to impact employee engagement.
If you're looking at building an elite organization, the formula for that is really simple. You need to have empowered managers and an engaged workforce. Hopefully, this gives you a roadmap on how to realize that objective.
