Why employee preparedness is essential for engagement
Morale suffers when workers feel left in the dark, neglected or ill-equipped to tackle what lies ahead. Here’s how to keep your team feeling confident and hopeful for the future.
One of the easiest ways to deflate your workforce is to leave them feeling uninformed and underprepared.
Some leaders like keeping workers “on their toes” with as little information or direction as possible. They claim that a culture of “agility” or self-directed activity leads to increased freewheeling innovation and impromptu problem-solving. There might be a kernel of truth in there somewhere, but neglecting preparation and inconsistent communication can devastate employee morale.
Gallup recently collected data regarding “employee preparedness and alignment” to track the impact COVID-19 has on this important engagement metric. Gallup found that:
U.S. employees and managers are about 20% less likely than they were in May 2020 to strongly agree that:
Gallup posits that the pandemic is causing widespread communication fatigue. Communicators and leaders are increasingly worn-down by the daily grind of disseminating (mostly bad, complex or convoluted) news, which is slowing the flow of messaging. The dearth of information, meanwhile, is leaving employees in the lurch.
(Image via Gallup)
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