For Business Owners, the Pandemic Proves it: Millennials were Right

I was recently talking with Jill Christensen about employee engagement 

The question was raised "do employees work hard at home?" and the answer to that is "yes".

I've worked at home for pretty much all my career and have never seen any work impact.  In fact I found that going in the office there were far too many people wanting "5 minutes" with me.  But for most employees that work from home they feel neglected.  You are not able to "pop in" on somebody or go and have a coffee.

When talking with Jill she said that "Companies often see that employee engagement is low and therefore they call up the Human Resources (HR) department to fix it."

She goes on to say "HR can help fix culture, but they are the "conductors" rather than the fixers.  The culture and any culture change must come from the leadership."

So what can we do as leaders to support remote employees?

The three things that Jill recommends are:-

1. Communication

2. Connection

3. Collaboration

Jill has created a remote worker manger action items list here https://eea.mykajabi.com/ManagerActionItems

Front line managers need to approach this with consistency and the business needs to be able to measure the improvement.

In other words, this cannot be approached by a couple of managers, but all managers but use the same approach and be measured.  Let's not forget  "What gets measured gets improved" Peter Drucker

To summarise:-

Approach strategically

Collective responsibility

Measure success

Corrective action