?
One of the toughest jobs of managers and executives is to figure out how to engage their employees. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace?report, only 13 percent of people around the world feel engaged at work.
?
Some companies may try to boost employee perks like free food or fun social events, but Liz Wiseman, the author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, suggests a less obvious way of engaging employees: make them do something hard.
?
In a Harvard Business Review article, Wiseman cites a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management?that?found the top driver of job satisfaction is?”the opportunity to use skills and abilities.” Wiseman posits that employees not only want their skills to be used at work, but they want to be challenged to expand those skills.
?
While researching her book Rookie Smarts, Wiseman surveyed 1,000 people from a variety of industries and found a strong correlation between those who felt challenged at work and those who felt satisfied. The survey also discovered that people were often ready for a new challenge sooner than you might think. That puts the burden on?managers to anticipate when an employee needs a new challenge before he or she starts feeling bored and disengaged.
?
As a leader, you should look out for the following signs to determine when employees are?ready for a new challenge: Everything they manage has run smoothly for a while;?when they encounter a problem they quickly find a solution;?they try to fix other problems at the office from different departments;?and they’ve become inexplicably negative. If you notice an employee who fits this description, it’s probably time to assign them a new challenge.
?
Read more at Inc.
?
