Talent

Train Managers to Follow These 8 Tips to Promote Employee Engagement

When a top performer leaves to go elsewhere and your organization is left with a huge void, says management expert Jeff Cortes, it can negatively affect the performance of the whole organization.

Turnover is also very costly, adds Cortes, author of the book No-Nonsense Retention … Painless Strategies to Retain Your Best People. Depending on the study you look at, the impact of turnover ranges from 3 months of salary for a low-level employee to as high as 400 percent of the annual salary of an upper-level person.

“If you are going to maximize your organization’s performance, you have to make a conscious, top-down management commitment to develop a no-nonsense approach to retention,” Cortes says.

Here are his top must-do actions that your managers must be trained to follow for retaining the human assets you’ve worked so hard to acquire:

1. Fire the Slugs. “There’s good and bad turnover,” Cortes says. Firing a nonperformer—a slug—is good turnover. Identify the nonperformers and confront them with the problem, Cortes says. If they don’t solve it, terminate them with respect and dignity and replace them with someone who does what is truly desired and required for the role and position they are in. And here’s the big bonus from firing slugs—your good performers will love you. For sure, they’ve been stewing about having to carry most of the slug’s load.

2. Manage Visibly. Get out of your office. Begin each day by walking around. Stroll around the floor several times a day. Meet the customers, talk with employees, greet the vendors, help the delivery trucks load and unload. Let people know you are there. If they like you, they are less likely to leave you. Visibility drives retention.


You know your managers could do a better job if they were trained—and now BLR® offers you an easy and affordable way to get that done—with our TrainingToday® 24/7 online Leadership Library. Get more information.


3. Care About Your People. Similarly, if you don’t really care about your people, the business is doomed. Caring is the reason people stay. Get to know your people. Learn what each person likes and enjoys. Listen to them and learn about their interests, families, and hobbies. Protect your people from harm and from others in your organization. Employees are loyal to those who care about them and for them.

4. Keep Your Door Open 80 Percent of the Time. Let your people know you are accessible to them, Cortes says. Avoid telling people to make an appointment or come back later. Make sure the time you do spend with your people is quality time, he adds.

5. Actively Focus on Employee Assistance. Sit down with the other managers and supervisors in your organization and identify the problems that are faced by people in your workforce. Develop innovative ideas and deploy specific new plans to provide employees with more flexibility in their work, support for their common needs, and help for dealing with personal issues that impact their life.

6. Treat Everyone with Respect Always. Every manager and supervisor must set the standard that respectful behavior and sincere open appreciation are expected with no exceptions, Cortes says. Investigate and take immediate action of all nonrespectful behavior incidents. And take an active step: Bring food to be shared on a regular basis. “Break bread with your people regularly instead of forcing people to eat baloney,” Cortes says. The point here is that you lead by example.

7. Ask Your People What They Want. Also remember to ask people what they want out of their work. Identify how they want to grow so you can help them develop greater control, autonomy, and responsibility for the work they do for you. Help them achieve these goals specifically and incrementally. “Meaningful engagement in their own future drives commitment and loyalty,” Cortes says.

8. Tell Your People What You Want of Them. Make sure you explain in clear and specific terms what you expect of them. Give them the tools, support, and time they need to get the work done. If they do not meet your expectations—assuming the expectations have been clearly communicated and they had the resources to satisfy them—bring them in to find out what it will take to get them on track.


Worried about ever getting your managers and supervisors trained to be effective leaders? It isn’t easy to fit it in—schedulewise or budgetwise—but now there’s BLR’s Leadership Library for Managers and Supervisors. Train all your people, at their convenience, 24/7, for one standard fee. Get more information.


Need More Leadership Training Content?

BLR® has just what you need in our Leadership Library on TrainingToday®.

This turnkey service requires no setup, no course development time, no software to install, and no new hardware. Your employees can self-register, and training can be taken anytime (24/7), anywhere, with nothing but a PC and an Internet connection. Courses take only about 30 minutes to complete.

Just as important, TrainingToday® automatically documents training. As trainees sign on, their identifications are automatically registered. When the program is completed, the trainee’s score is entered. So, when you want to see who has or hasn’t yet trained on any subject or you want to look at the across-the-board activity of any one employee, it’s all there, instantly available to you, your boss, an inspector—even a plaintiff’s attorney.

These are all motivational, actionable programs—for both employees and supervisors—in such key areas as sexual harassment, the FMLA, diversity, communication, USERRA, recruiting, and many more. The courses are kept up to date to reflect federal and state regulatory changes, and what’s more, we continually add new programs.

The Leadership Library for Managers and Supervisors, for example, provides you with a sensible (and economic) solution.

The Leadership Library for Managers and Supervisors allows you to:

  • Train on demand. Employees can complete training anytime from anywhere. All they need are a computer and an Internet connection.
  • Reinforce training topics with engaging graphics and quizzes to test their knowledge.
  • Monitor and track the results of your training program with the built-in recordkeeping tool.
  • Save costs. The more you train, the more cost-effective the training becomes.

The Leadership Library for Managers and Supervisors is a Web-based training tool that can be utilized by any organization. All you need are a computer and Internet access—the library is available 24/7.

Start Your Free Trial Today!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *