Advice on Building Engagement From the Motley Fool

Advice on Building Engagement 

Several CUE experts recently presented at the Tdn2K Global Practices Conference in Dallas, covering issues facing the restaurant industry during the coming year.  There were a myriad of other speakers who offered great advice including Tom Gardner of the Motley Fool.  In her post on the Tdn2K website, blogger and attorney Liz D’Aloia shared some of the advice Gardner passed on his speech.  You may find some of the tips to be useful in building a positive employee relations environment in your workplace.

 

 

….Tom Gardner, the CEO and Co-Founder of the Motley Fool, reminded us that the average Gallup employee engagement score is 30%. Even if you’re lucky enough to have an engagement score of 80%, that still means that one out of five of your employees don’t care about coming to work.

The majority of college graduates entering the workforce are looking for three core things from an employer: money, flexibility and purpose. Here are some best practices that Tom shared with us:

• Have an electronic (or traditional) white board that automatically updates sales, goals, and examples of living your company’s vision and values (purpose).
• Create a compensation committee that’s focused on non-financial rewards.
• Use some of the basic tools and tests that are available online to ask your employees how to do their work – and increase effectiveness.
• Recognize people regularly
• Consider using You Earned It. You Earned It is an app that allows peer-to-peer recognition. You can set currency parameters in the app that translates into gift cards and philanthropic giving. It’s easy to set up donations to No Kid Hungry/Share Our Strength through the app, which can support your company’s social responsibility goals.
• Turn your organization into a social network. Use Slack, Yammer, or even a Facebook page to encourage communication.

Aside from social interaction and interpersonal communication, Gardner challenged the audience to consider a larger workplace issue – are your values really core if everyone can’t recite them? Have just a few core values and make sure at least 2 are inviolate – or at least called out when they are violated.

We’ll have more on the CUE panel at Tdn2K later this week.

Quotes from a blog post by Liz D’Aloia. Liz  is the founder of HR Virtuoso, a mobile recruiting company based in Dallas, TX. She is an HR professional, employment attorney, speaker, and blogger. Prior to launching HR Virtuoso Liz worked at national transportation companies and at a global retailer. Connect with Liz @hrvirtuoso.