Boost Engagement for Better Business Outcomes
Higher engagement leads to better customer interaction, productivity, retention, and 21% greater profitability.
If your employee engagement is not where it needs to be, here are three top recommendations:
Ignite Purpose: Connect roles and objectives to the overarching strategic goals and customer needs, enabling everyone to understand their contribution and derive meaning from their work.
Accelerate Collaborative Culture: Empower managers to ensure every voice is heard, acknowledged, and appreciated.
Make Celebration Count: Recognize team and individual achievements publicly and offer learning and growth opportunities.
How do you upskill your managers in a meaningful way?
From years of behavioral research and experience in developing talent, here’s our top piece of advice:
Focus on Business Impact First
Sounds simple, right? But what does this actually entail?
Let’s examine the traditional model. With good intentions, you may decide that all your managers need to be better strategic thinkers and more active listeners. You identify who needs improvement in these areas, organize workshops, and invite experts to assist.
Despite achieving 70% attendance at your workshops, actively engaging managers during the sessions, and encouraging them to implement what they learned within their teams, the reality often falls short. Most managers struggle to apply these techniques in their daily work—not because they disagree with their importance, but because they are overwhelmed by their ongoing job demands once they return to their desks. While you may receive positive feedback on the workshops, it raises an essential question: So what? Have you genuinely helped the managers improve team culture and enhance employee engagement?
The method of upskilling is just as crucial as the content itself. It’s imperative that your training connects directly to specific leadership outcomes and business impacts. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Our Recommendation
Stop merely pushing skills or competencies. Instead, concentrate on the business impact—the individual’s challenges or opportunities. For instance, a manager might say,
- “I want to align my team goals to those of the organization, but the organizational goals change so often that I am not even clear on what those are!“
- “My team does not take accountability for the quality of the work, I need to spend less time finishing their work and more time coaching them through completion!“
Since each challenge is unique, deliver a hyper-personalized upskilling experience tailored to address that specific issue. Ultimately, you can measure the results:
- “My team has taken accountability for new team goals and have a clear line-of-sight to how their work contributes to the whole.“
- “I freed up about 2 hours a day from producing the work and instead spending that 2 hours coaching my team. They love it and are really stepping up their game!“
And, yes, the manager has learned more about strategic thinking and actively listening in the process.
Learning & Development is often seen as discretionary. The answer? Prioritize business impact.
“When I take on any new role, my first focus is understanding customer needs and assessing our talent to meet those needs. In this case, we rose to the challenge and accelerated our diverse talent in record time—unheard of!”
MEET Toni: Chief People Officer, 18 years experience
“Our recent reorganization has led to alarming levels of low employee engagement. We must act now, as our top talents are beginning to seek opportunities elsewhere. We need to make some quick changes that signal to employees we are serious about the culture and are committed to improving not in years but in months. What can we do to change and change fast?”
Toni launched a monthly pulse survey to track employee engagement more frequently and initiated inspiring town hall meetings where leaders shared the organization’s vision and strategy.
She then partnered with managers in two key divisions to provide tailored leadership development, leveraging Gotara’s neuroscience-based approach to ensure impactful and sustainable growth. This strategy equipped managers to align teams to the mission and foster a culture of inclusivity and collaboration, transforming the workplace into a space where everyone feels valued and inspired to contribute their best.
The results? After nine months, engagement survey scores rose by 20%, with one manager demonstrating a 100% increase in innovation and another a 15% boost in productivity. Toni and the executive team are committed to implementing manager leadership development organization-wide to improve the overall culture.
Gotara Works
UP TO97%
of participants retained
UP TO76%
of participants had their careers accelerated within the 1st year
94%
of participants rate a 20-80% improvement on specific skills
94%
of participants made Moderate to Significant advancements towards their goal
Ready to tap into engagement and rock business results?
