Are Your People Spending Enough Time with the Boss?

culled from:wobi.com

Inspired, innovative, engaged and motivated employees are what every leader wants, but many leaders don’t spend nearly enough time with their employees to generate those outcomes. Leadership IQ recently surveyed over 32,000 people and we discovered that most people spend around 3 hours per week (or less) interacting with their boss.  While that may seem like a lot of time, it turns out that to shape an optimally motivated, engaged, inspired, and innovative team, leaders should spend around 6 hours per week interacting with their employees.  In fact, people who spend 6 hours are 29% more inspired—30% more engaged—and 16% more innovative than people who only spend 1 hour per week interacting with their leader.

Obviously, increasing the time you spend with your employees is important, but barging into someone’s office and staring at them for a few hours won’t work.  It’s important to fill the time with real value.  I recommend engaging your employees in conversations that allow you to learn about your people and to discuss their goals and solicit their great ideas. And, since our study findings also indicate that face-to-face interaction is more effective than email, phone, video conferencing, texting, social media, etc., ifyou can have these conversations face-to-face, that’s even better.

The following four conversations will help get you started. You’ll be amazed by how much more motivated, engaged, inspired, and innovative your people will become just from these simple and sincere interactions.

1.      Monthly “Shoves and Tugs” conversations: tap into your employees’ intrinsic motivators (“Tugs”) and demotivators (“Shoves”) by first asking “Tell me about a time in the past month when you felt motivated?”  Next ask “Tell me about a time in the past month when you felt demotivated?” Phrase these questions in a way that feels natural for you.  You may hear responses that sound a bit superficial at first, but be persistent.  Building trust and connection takes time.  And make sure to take fast action when employees do share their true feelings, even if it’s just to say “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do right now.”

2.      Learn about employees’ growth goals: this is as easy as asking “What’s something you’d like to get better at next month?”  Employees who feel like they’re learning on the job are significantly more engaged than those who feel stagnant in their work.  And if you’ve got Millennial employees, then you really need to keep them learning.  Keep tabs on your people’s growth goals and provide support where you can.  It will keep your people engaged and who doesn’t want a workforce that’s constantly improving its capabilities?

3.      Discover the barriers frustrating your folks: get right to the point by asking “What roadblocks or breakdowns have frustrated you this month?”  The legendary Jack Welch used to say “The people closest to the work know it better than their bosses.”  There’s no better group to ask for ideas for improving your operations than your own employees.  They’ll give you fantastic improvement ideas and the more operations improve, the better (and less frustrating) their life becomes.  Plus, the more you listen to your people, the more engaged they’ll become.

4.      Find opportunities to positively reinforce employees:“What were your proudest moments this past month?” is all it takes to get this conversation started.  Learning what employees consider their proudest moments/accomplishments ensures that you never look out-of-touch by forgetting to recognize their major successes.  (Few things kill employee engagement more than a boss who misses or ignores great accomplishments).  Not only does this force you to recognize your team’s accomplishments, but it also pinpoints the folks who are and aren’t performing.  If an employee says “My proudest moment this month was making it to work 50% of the time,” you’ve just been given some critical performance management data.

One note of caution: Don’t overdo it!  It turns out that there can be too much of a good thing. When people spend more than six hours per week interacting with their leader, diminishing returns are shown in terms of building inspiration, engagement and motivation. While there may be other benefits to interacting with one's leader more than six hours per week, our study shows levels of inspiration or engagement remain the same or declined beyond six hours of interaction. The only exception to this is seen in innovation, which shows spikes at 11-15 hours, and again at 20+ hours spent with their leader.