How to engage employees by boosting their confidence

Ensuring staff are confident and secure in their roles should be a key concern for leaders.

Studies show that happier employees are more productive, more engaged, and have less time off.

HR Leader hosted “How HR can lead during economic uncertainty”, in partnership with HiBob, to discuss how employers can get the most out of their staff by engaging them and boosting their confidence.

“I think employee confidence comes from a few places for us, it also varies by country, and we have different challenges in different areas. Sometimes a certain area of the business will see another area growing but feel that they’re not getting the growth that they’re looking for, and that creates its own challenges around confidence and how people are feeling,” said Meredith Crowe, interim senior vice-president for global people and culture at Telix Pharmaceuticals.

“Being as transparent as we can, being as honest and as open as we can, having that data in place to be able to reassure people where that’s relevant and where we are confident in that as well.”

One tip Ms Crowe gave is to find balance in your decisions.

“You want to land somewhere between realistic and optimistic. You want to make sure that people aren’t seeing the business as being too conservative or too reckless.”

“I would hate to turn around to someone and say, sorry, our [learning and development] budget has shrunk this year, but we’re still doing massages. I think navigating the tensions and the optics around what we’re investing in is really important,” she explained.

Supporting managers and providing them with the skills and resources to do their job properly is important, as the benefits will trickle down to the employees too.

“At the individual level, remuneration conversations and future conversations can be some of the most stressful that managers have … Having structures from people and culture that really support frontline leaders to have those conversations with confidence. And that can be training, it can be FAQs, it can be some coaching, and it can actually just be having access to benchmarking data and remuneration data,” Ms Crowe said.

“Supporting managers to be able to have those conversations with confidence and in a way that leaves the employee feeling really confident is the most important.”

Damien Andreasen, regional senior vice-president at HiBob, agrees with Ms Crowe, noting that transparency is key.

“There’s a lot of these things that are happening right now that we need to be aware of for individuals. And I think some of those things that we talk about as a business locally and also globally is we always talk about transparency,” Mr Andreasen said.

“Running through the numbers of where the business is at, what the outlook looks like, what the goals are, why those goals are important, what are the things we’re doing to adapt to the current market. I think those kinds of conversations from top down, but also consistently reinforce with management so that management really understands the strategy to reinforce with the employees is really important.”

Personalising support can also be an effective way to engage staff. A one-size-fits-all approach may not always be viable, and some individualised attention could be effective.

Mr Andreasen continued: “One-to-one management, which is getting to more of an individual way of understanding what drives people, what motivates them, what are their concerns, and how do we manage that?”

“When we do one-on-one, we completely drop the idea of talking about anything performance related. We talk about them as an individual and we check in with them; we get to understand what’s happening with them on a personal level, how connected are they to the job, are they motivated, and what are the things that might be increasing or decreasing that happiness over time.”

“A lot of the time, what it really just does is give someone a bit of a listing board at work and builds empathy between management and employees about what’s actually happening in their personal lives. And sometimes the little tips like that can have a really big impact on the way that you actually work with your teams.”

This webcast, in partnership with HiBob, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full audio conversation on 28 February can be found here.