Reading the body language of Employee Engagement
What’s your organisation’s body language, and is it driving employee engagement?
Yes, that’s right, your organisation uses body language.
The organisation says it is environmentally friendly and yet is uses styrofoam cups at the water cooler. This is just one of the topics we discussed during our Let’s Start a Conversation webinar on January 30. We invited guest partners Engage Me, employee engagement and branding specialists, to discuss how to use language as a driver of employee engagement.
We blended what we know about Emotional Intelligence and how we impact others by the way we manage ourselves emotionally, with how both verbal and visual language creates an emotional connection with employees and discussed the following key themes:
Moods matters
The Vitality 2017 report published by Six Seconds found:
- Organisations that created a positive mood were 26x more likely to have high trust and therefore be in high performance
- Where the mood was less than positive, organisations were 16x more likely to have retention issues
Language
Language creates strong emotions and powerful images:
- A visual strategy map is a great tool to communicate strategy in such a way that every employee can understand what is required of them – from the cleaners and security guards to senior management
Be intentional
Be intentional with your use of language:
- What feelings do you want to create in your employees?
- Design the language that will help create that feeling
Be brain friendly
Use brain friendly language:
- Tell me more about your idea
- That is interesting
- Thank you for the feedback
- What would you do …
Organisations can drive employee engagement through the use of language by:
1) Bringing Corporate Values and their supporting behaviours to life through purposeful and intentional language.
2) Using a variety of EQ and other Neuroscience based tools and methodologies to learn a language around emotional self awareness, expression and self management, and then develop the skills to use their EQ.
3) Aligning all the HR practices, such as performance management, to this language. Build emotionally intelligent individuals, teams and organisations who help create the mood the company desires.
4) Aligning employer branding with the desired organisational culture.
5) Internal communications: align functions such as Strategy, HR and Compliance to enhance employee engagement with programmes being run by the business.
6) Employee Value Proposition – consistently articulating the promise that you make to your current and future employees across every touchpoint in the employee lifecycle – from recruitment to onboarding and even the final exit interview.
Is your organisation’s body language generating the feelings that you want to create amongst your employees? Where are your opportunities to use language to drive employee engagement in your organisation?
Let’s Start a Conversation…
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