How To Ignite Passion In Your Employees

Employee engagement is at crisis levels in some companies – sure, maybe your people show up physically (or perhaps not, depending on your telecommute policies) but do they show up mentally? Are they willing to give their maximum effort to your company for what you are paying them, or are they just going through the motions and phoning in their job, waiting to jump to the next company that they may be more interested in (don’t worry, there are only a few of those, so chances are low).

How do you take your employees and ratchet up their engagement levels? How do you get them to genuinely care about your company, and exceed your expectation of them in their roles? Driving this kind of passion requires a few things you may or may not already have – here are some things which help:

  1. Do you have a strong vision, articulated by your leadership, for the company?
  2. Does this strong vision talk about getting rich, or helping your customers realize their dreams?
  3. Do you have a visible leader who provides this kind of guidance?

You would be surprised at how few companies frame a compelling vision, or have a vision that is not financial or competitive (we strive to be the number 1 company in the XYZ space), or have a strong, visible leader who espouses this vision (or versions of this vision). Does your leadership talk about denting the universe, or blowing through your next quarter’s numbers?

Does your leader inspire, or make matters worse? How would you feel if your leadership signed off all of their all-hands meetings with “OK, you can all go back to your naps.” Sure, maybe he thought it was funny, but do the workers, toiling for long hours to keep the company going, feel the same?

You need your employees to re-invest in the company – to realize that there are more reasons than merely financial to be here. How do you do this? Well, if you don’t have the compelling non-financial vision, or a strong, visible leader, there are a few other things that you can do.
Engage your employees by bringing them into the conversation about the future of your company.
Too often, workers feel a disconnect between their contributions and the companies direction. However, if your leadership comes out and explicitly asks every employee for their thoughts on the future of the company, and implement a few of them visibly, then your employees will feel more vested in the future of the company and thus feel more engaged.
They may finally feel that they genuinely contribute to the future of the company, and that will naturally improve their engagement.
Simultaneously, this will generate new ideas for you to pursue, some of which may turn out to be game changers. These ideas were sitting in the minds of your employees, and all you needed to do was to set yourself up to listen.