How does leadership impact employee engagement: Tips and survey questions to enhance your organizational leadership

Employees don’t leave organizations, they leave managers. This is a simple yet powerful take on how leadership influences employee engagement.

But how do you ensure that you tackle employee turnover in your organization?

It is easy. All you have to do is, start listening to your employees and establish an employee-centered leadership that makes them feel comfortable and motivates them to put their best foot forward. But it's not as simple as it sounds, because how you listen to them and what you do after matters too.

Imagine this, Gunther is a manager of a sales team. He often delegates hard-to-meet targets to his team since he believes that speed and efficiency of task completion are what will motivate his team to succeed quicker. However, he seldom takes his employees' anonymous feedback and as a result, is unaware of how his team is feeling about his approach.

Not-so-surprisingly, Gunther’s team sees high attrition rates.

Without feedback, poor Gunther has no idea that employees arren’t aligning with his strategy.

And the result?

The organization and Gunther spent huge amounts of time and money in hiring and training new resources!

“40% of employees want their employers to train managers and supervisors to identify emotional distress among workers (AHA)”

Employee engagement is not always just an HR leader’s responsibility. There is only so much an HR can do if employees are dissatisfied with their managers. This is why employers need to train their managers to become good leaders and equip them with tools and resources to listen and cater to the employees better.

A leader should have a positive influence over their team, should motivate employees to perform their jobs to the best of their ability, and in the process improve the team’s retention rates.

Let us walk you through how exactly leadership affects your employee engagement and how you can improve it.

How does your leadership impact your employee engagement?

With the advent of the hybrid work environment, the gap has increased between employees and leaders, as leaders have become less accessible.

“30% of employees said their manager does not foster a culture of open and transparent communication (SHRM).”

That is why having a transparent, collaborative, and inclusive work environment is a must-have for creating a good work culture.

But how do you align your leadership skills to create a work culture where your employees are the biggest promoters of your organization?

Here are some ideas that we think people leaders should keep in mind to improve their engagement levels:

• Have a shared purpose with your employees - Giving employees a shared purpose to work and making them believe in the vision they are working for is of paramount importance to garner their engagement. A leader should think about ways to inspire and motivate their teams to achieve organizational goals and at the same time, should promote every employees’ personal growth.
• Mentor and coach your employees - Supporting and guiding your employees in whatever task they do goes a long way in establishing engagement in a team. As a leader, you need to empower your employees by providing them with ample growth and development opportunities.
• Bring clarity in your communication - As a leader, you need to communicate the organizational goals with utmost clarity to your employees and make sure that you are easily accessible for any clarifications from your team. And a large part of establishing good communication with your team involves listening to them because that will give you insights about their struggles and will help you devise a solution for them.
• Bring in positivity - Being optimistic and bringing positivity to your team in tough times is a critical quality of a great leader. As a leader, your positivity in a team environment will motivate employees to tackle any kind of work situation. Even small acts like caring about their health and personal lives and being friendly to them can go a long way in improving your employee engagement.
• Be empathetic and flexible - Empathy plays a quintessential role in employee leadership, and great leaders would always imagine themselves in the shoes of their employees before setting up any policies or assigning tasks to their employees. Also, displaying empathy improves trust amongst employees and will positively influence their engagement levels.

With that being said, let us see how you can gather inputs from your employees to improve your leadership skills.

Employee leadership survey questions

By now, you would have known how important it is to listen to your employees, and you might have heard from your fellow industry leaders that sending surveys is the best way to do that.

But wait, not so fast. Sending random and irrelevant questions in your survey about employee leadership without addressing your employees’ issues will not help your cause much.

Moreover, from a management point of view, an employer needs to understand how they can enable their managers and leaders to make sure that their engagement efforts are aligned to the company’s employee engagement goals.

For that to happen, an easier way is to provide your managers with software or a tool to send surveys and gauge the feedback of your employees at a faster pace; to take actions based on their feedback, in an attempt to improve their engagement levels.

But how do employers know if the engagement initiatives are effective enough or not? And how can they enable their managers to improve their individual team’s employee engagement in a personalized way?

This is where CultureMonkey’s personalized engagement could be of help to a manager.

CultureMonkey’s manager dashboard enables you, as a manager, to assess your strengths and weaknesses with deep insights about individual driver scores based on survey results, which will help you further in gauging what you need to improve in your engagement efforts.

We can discuss this on a whole larger scale, but let us give you the questions that you came for:

1. Do you believe that your team leader has been communicating well with you and is linking the company strategy/vision to your work?
2. Is your team leader always accessible to you to guide you and resolve your work-related issues?
3. Do you believe that your manager cares about both your professional and personal growth?
4. Does your manager help you in facilitating the things you need to achieve your organizational goals?
5. Do you believe that your managers take your feedback seriously and help to resolve your issues in the workplace?
6. Do you believe your manager is being empathetic and flexible to you?
7. Do you believe that your manager creates a positive work culture in your team?
8. Does your manager give equal attention and importance to your entire team without any bias?
9. Do you think your manager often provides you constructive feedback on what could be improved about your work?
10. What do you think as a management team we should do to improve your work experience with your leader?