Winning Hearts and Minds to Motivate Employee Engagement

Every company has a culture. It is the values, beliefs, and behaviors of employees and management. The culture sets the tone for how people work, interact with each other, and what they do on a day-to-day basis.

Organizations are beginning to realize that their culture is what drives their success.

A strong culture is crucial to the employee experience, improving motivation, happier employees who are more productive, and the delivery of superior customer experiences that drive revenues.

The question is, how do you create an organizational culture plan that will deliver all of this and more?

Create the conditions to attract and retain the best talent

It may be something of a cliche, but your people are the heart of your organization. Your success depends upon the talent you attract and retain. Therefore you must take steps to create exceptional employer branding that achieves the goal of increasing and improving your human talent. To do so, you must:

  • Articulate an inspiring purpose
  • An inspiring purpose is a vision for your organization that helps you make decisions and inspires your people to achieve your goals. It can be anything from a simple statement about who you are or what your values are, to developing a complex plan of how to live out your values in the world.

  • Share a vision for how to manifest your purpose
  • Employees will be able to work with more passion and dedication if they understand why they are doing what they do. Organizations that do not have a clear and compelling vision for how to manifest their purpose will struggle to retain talent, grow revenue, or maintain profitability.

  • Train your leaders in effective employee engagement
  • Leaders should focus on how to keep their employees engaged and happy. They need to make sure that they are not just focusing on their own personal agenda and instead have a servant-leader mindset towards their employees, and are adept at keeping everyone’s hearts and minds focused on how much they love your organization.

  • Measure your teams’ performance and understand their expectations
  • It is important to put structures in place that allow you to have a good understanding of what your team’s expectations are. This will help you understand where they are coming from and the best way to design employee experiences. As you do so, you should also measure their performance to monitor how well your strategies are working.

  • Help teams develop the characteristics of a growth mindset
  • Create opportunities for employees to improve their knowledge and capabilities, inspiring them to develop a growth mindset that helps them achieve more than they think they could. This is a positive approach, focusing on new learning, innovative ideas, and the willingness to take on challenges.

  • Help people feel valued and appreciated
  • When people feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to be motivated to do better work

Steps to Getting Your Game Plan Together

Let’s start creating a cultural plan by getting your game plan together with these six steps:

Step #1: Human capital culture creation

The importance of human capital culture creation is that it helps to shape an organization’s identity. It also helps to create a unified sense of purpose and direction within an organization. It can also help with recruitment and retention efforts. This process may also have some negative impacts on both employees and employers if not done properly.

Step #2: Strategic plan ─ goal and priority setting

Strategic planning is a process of defining the direction, scope, and objectives of an organization. It also sets out the strategies and actions to achieve these objectives. This process helps organizations in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, setting goals and priorities, and evaluating progress.

Step #3: Values and behaviors development work

Values and behaviors development work is one of the most important aspects of human development. It is necessary for the individual to have a healthy self-image, a sense of purpose, and an understanding of their own strengths. Focus on skills such as emotional intelligence, goal setting, time management, empathy, responsibility, and more. This type of work helps individuals develop the skills that are necessary for them to be successful in their personal lives as well as in their professional lives.

Step #4: Leadership engagement development work

The goal of leadership engagement development work is to develop leadership skills to have a positive impact on an organization. It helps leaders and managers to grow in their roles, develop new skills and take on new responsibilities. This can be done through coaching, mentoring, and other development processes.

Step #5: Socializing the work in the larger organization

An organization’s success depends on the cohesion of its employees and how well they collaborate. One way to achieve this is by socializing the work, helping people to understand each other’s roles, and fostering feelings of belonging to an organisation which is more akin to being part of a family.

Step #6: Define and employ metrics to measure your culture

Employing metrics to measure culture is a crucial step toward creating a culture that will drive success. Some metrics that you may use include:

  • Employee engagement
  • Employee satisfaction
  • Employee turnover rates
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Customer retention rates

Benefits of having a new organizational culture plan

The new organizational culture plan should be a combination of company values and the employees’ needs. It is a way to get everyone on board, and it should be able to help you achieve your goals.

A new organizational culture plan will help you to understand what your values are and how they align with the business’s vision. It will also help you to understand how your organization is currently operating and what type of culture would be best for it.

The benefits of developing an organizational culture plan that is designed to enhance the employee experience include:

  • Greater employee retention
  • Increased profit per employee
  • Increased performance
  • Decreased time to recruit open positions
  • Increased emotional engagement agility and morale

Takeaway ─ Take stock and ask the following questions

As you design and develop your culture plan, it’s crucial to ensure that it remains on track to deliver the envisaged benefits. As you take stock of your existing culture and design your new culture plan, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Do we shelter toxic leaders?
  • Do we have the right people in the right places?
  • Do our leaders have the skills to lead these changes?
  • How strong was our culture before the pandemic?
  • Is our work environment transactional?
  • Are our benefits aligned with employee priorities?
  • Employees want career paths and development opportunities. Can we provide it?
  • How are we building a sense of community?
  • Are we preserving processes and procedures that are no longer valid?

An organization’s culture will affect the way it does business. A good culture is one that is inclusive and encourages teamwork among employees. A bad culture will tear apart a company from the inside out, creating an environment where employees are not happy to be at work.

How is your current culture doing? When was the last time you measured your employee engagement, and discussed employee experience and its place in the equation?

Fast-forward five years. Where do you see yourself and your organization? Will you be able to look back and see your current challenges as the greatest gift?

Where do you start? Complete the Personal Values Assessment to get a comprehensive insight into your organizational culture – the insight that will help you make more effective decisions, and aid in alignment with team members and colleagues.

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