But as a communicator who is passionate about engagement, I like several of Tindell’s ideas:

• Communication is leadership. Employees are hungry for information. The more upfront and transparent you can be, the more likely you are to develop an engaged workforce.
• In employment interviews, discuss the company’s philosophy and culture. Don’t just talk about it—have a discussion so that you get a sense of whether the applicant shares those ideals. People who share your company’s philosophy and values are more likely to become engaged employees.
• Like a boat, every person has a wake. When we do something, we leave a wake behind us that affects everyone around us. We should keep this in mind as we make decisions and take action. More positive things will come out of our wake, I’m sure.
• One great person = three good people. The Container Store’s comp philosophy is to pay well for great people. If you’re a great person, that’s good for you, and it’s good for the company (because the employee isn’t likely to get paid that much elsewhere!). I realize it’s not always possible, but compensating employees for the value they provide is a win-win. Compensating great employees—those who are verifiably great—equally to “okay” employees isn’t going to help you retain the A players.

What I don’t like about Tindell’s ideas—meetings. He admits they have frequent, passionate and long meetings that include more participants than may be necessary. Surely we can all make do with fewer, shorter meetings.

Read the interview.

The next time you send an email to your employees, take a few minutes to review it and ask yourself these questions that I’ve used to help “clean up” internal emails.

1. Is my distribution list appropriate for the message? You might be able to create a custom distribuion list (“DL”) using a report from your HR system and help from your IT partners. If your only choice is to send the message to “all employees” when the target audience is 401(k) participants, for example, start your email with “To: Our Company’s 401(k) Participants”
2. Are the grammar and spelling correct? I’ve sent emails to “Mangers” before. It’s embarrassing. Don’t be afraid to ask someone else to review your email before you send it. Set up the email and send a test to a co-worker to review.  
3. Is the email short and to the point? Employees are busy. Managers are busy. The email about processing payroll deductions is critical (to you and the IRS), but not when an employee is closing a deal or helping a customer. Omit the background and history. Tell the employee the basics of what they need to know and why it’s important that they know it. Period.
4. Is it “ez” to read? Employees are busy. Managers are busy. They don’t have time to wade through the HR lingo and legal mumbo-jumbo. Short sentences, short paragraphs and simple language are easiest understand with a quick read.
5. Did I omit all CAPITAL LETTERS and multi-colored fonts? I hesitated to list this tip because I think everyone knows email “best practices,” but when you’re trying to get someone’s attention, it’s easy to slip into bad habits. These attention-grabbing techniques are irritating and akin to yelling at your audience. Treat your readers with respect and DROP THE CAPS.
6. What’s my subject line? The subject line is one way your readers decide whether to read your email, so choose your words thoughtfully. When your email asks the recipient to take action, try starting the subject line with “ACTION REQUIRED:.” (I think caps in subject lines are acceptable since you don’t have the option for bold letters.) 

While you can’t make your audience read your emails, you can make your emails easy to read. Chances are, you’ll get a few more readers.

Among the characteristics Ms. Love suggests are:

1. Authentic and reliable. Employees need to know that they can look to their leaders for truthful, consistent decisions and actions. Employees appreciate an environment where the unexpected is not a daily event.
2. Connected to the business and culture. Employees will have concerns at work–concerns about the economy, their jobs and more. Leaders may be removed from those concerns, but they need to be sufficiently connected to the business and culture that they can understand and address those concerns.
3. Optimistic. Employees need leaders who recognize the negatives but  focus on positives and strive for success because obtaining success is challenging, exciting and rewarding.
4. Driven by purpose and passion. Employee engagement is all about creating a culture and business purpose that employees can be passionate about. And the greater the engagement, the more successful the company.
5. Inclusive. Encouraging employees to share ideas and opinions and listening to those thoughts builds a strong team.
6. Respectful. Respect should be one of every company’s core values. It’s top on the list of what employees want at work, and in organizations where respect and kindness is lacking, you will find unhappy and disengaged employees.
7. Support of management development. Building “bench strength” for the future by supporting management and employee development encourages employees to give back to the company that supports them and their careers.

The more a company’s leader demonstrates these characteristics, the more engaged the company’s workforce will be.

As employee engagement consultants, we can use this guide to encourage and support the “right” behaviors from our management teams.

There are small, cost-effective steps you can take to improve morale and begin to rebuild engagement. Make time for the little things and take advantage of opportunities to recognize employees’ contributions and to offer opportunities for increased responsibility that allow employees to build their skill sets.

Over the past few years, I’ve collected ideas for cost-effective ways to recognize employees and build morale. Below is my “top ten” list. If you have a favorite low-cost morale-building tip, I’d love to hear from you.

1. Give your time. Employees appreciate one-on-one time with managers. Schedule individual meetings and ask employees what they like about their jobs or about working for the company. Ask for ideas to improve customer service. Ask about skills they’d like to learn. Just be prepared to act on (or respond to) any recommendations or requests that you may get.
2. Give employees responsibilities. Provide opportunities for employees to develop new skills. Ask longer-service employees or those with industry experience to train employees who are new to your company or your industry—they’ll build coaching skills. Rotate the responsibility for planning an event or meeting among employees so that they have an opportunity to use their organizational skills.  Ask supervisory employees to plan and chair your staff meetings.
3. Have fun. Create a fun award that can be passed from employee to employee on a monthly basis. Consider recognizing the best customer service, surviving a difficult customer, the longest time without an accident, biggest new/renewed account, etc. Use a creative/silly item for the award such as a funny hat, a rubber chicken or a stuffed animal.
4. Take a look around the office. Who’s there every day and on time, does his/her job accurately and efficiently and works well with others but hasn’t been recognized with your regular company awards? Be sure you thank and recognize those employees.
5. “Do lunch” with a manager. When a regional or corporate manager visits your location, schedule a lunch with employees—a small group lunch (ask for volunteers) or an all-employee lunch. The regional/corporate manager can get to know your employees and answer any questions the employees may have about the company and the industry.
6. Park the car. If parking’s an issue at your location, draw names to see who gets the prime parking spot each week/month. If you have executive parking, draw names to see who gets the boss’s spot when she’s out of the office for the day.
7. Use the phone. At the end of each day, think about the employees on your team who did a great job that day. After they’ve left for the day, call their work phones and leave messages, thanking them individually for what they did. When they arrive at work the next morning and check their voice mail, yours will be the first message they get—what a great way to start the day.
8. Write a note. When someone does a good job, send a handwritten thank you note. Consider sending it to the employee’s family so they know what a great job their parent or spouse is doing.
9. Serve the community. Ask employees to pick a community service project (or one every few months) that they can plan for and participate in as a group. You’ll build camaraderie and pride in the company.
10. Walk the floor. Take time each week to walk around the office and speak to employees. Make sure to visit each shift. By getting to know employees personally, you build a relationship with them and they are more comfortable sharing ideas with you.

About 10 years ago, I was fortunate to work for a forward-thinking manager. When I needed to strike a better balance between my work life and my family life, he offered me an opportunity to work from home on a part-time basis. I didn’t realize at the time that I was among the few, if not the only, employee at the company who was “telecommuting.”

I spent the next 10 years working from home, sometimes just a day a week, other times I was working at home the entire week. My personal situation, my meeting schedule and the availability of a desk a the office were frequently among the factors that determined where I was on any given day.

The Benefits to Me–the Employee

In addition to the fact that I didn’t have to find a new job, and I saved money on clothing (yes, I did spend some days in my bunny slippers and PJs) and gas, there were benefits that were, as the MasterCard commercial says, “priceless.”

Flexibility. As a telecommuter, I enjoyed the flexible schedule. I could be at home, keeping an eye on teenagers in the afternoon and work while they were at school or soccer practice or were doing homework after dinner. I was known to work some crazy hours (my co-workers would tell you about receiving 3 a.m. emails from me), but it worked for me and my family.

Less Stress; Greater Concentration. With telecommuting, I wasn’t worried as much about my sons because I was spending more time with them, which meant I could concentrate on work when I was working. Plus, I had fewer interruptions, which meant I had longer blocks of time for writing.

Less Chatter. Let’s face it, we sometimes waste time in the office. Joe stops by to ask about a project. We talk about that, but soon the conversation veers toward what we did over the weekend. With telecommuting, that’s cut to a minimum since you have to make a phone call, IM or text to have a conversation.

Trust. When I was given the opportunity to telecommute, I knew that my managers trusted me to get my job done, whatever it took. They were paying me to develop communication plans and to write, edit and distribute those communications on time. As long as I delivered satisfactorily, I could continue to telecommute. Because of that trust, I made sure I upheld my end of the agreement.

Benefits to the Company

Retention. My company retained a good, experienced employee they otherwise would have lost. They retained the time and training they’d invested in me and avoided spending time and money to replace me.

Increased productivity. Less stress, more concentration and less chatter all result in greater productivity. In addition, because I felt I had to live up to the expectations of my managers, I gave them 110% in return for the trust they placed it me.

Low-cost. This is a low-cost benefit. There’s the time the  company should spend developing a solid telecommuting policy. And depending on the need and what the company is willing to provide, there may be additional investments in equipment, but compared to other benefits, the cost of this is minimal.

It’s Not for Everyone

Telecommuting doesn’t work for every company, for every job or for every individual. If you’re a member of the Society of Human Resources Management (www.shrm.org), they’ve got some great resources for creating telecommuting policies and agreements, as well as lists of the kinds of jobs that are suited for telecommuting (not tellers, dock workers or retail clerks, but certainly word processors, analysts and designers).

I suggest that employers explore the options. Not every employee wants to telecommute and not all of them are suited for it (self-motivation, responsibility and job knowledge are among the traits of a good telecommuter). Offer an employee a “trial run” to see if telecommuting will work. Just don’t say “no” without considering the benefits.

As I was talking to him, I had a flash of understanding on another level.

A ”subject matter expert” can have difficulty conveying informaton about his/her field to people in other jobs. More specifically, when a project team needs to rollout a process or a system, they often talk too technically for the average user. They may give too many details or go to the other extreme and overlook key information that would help the user understand basic concepts or background information.

For the HR team (or any corporate team, for that matter), that’s where an employee communicator can help. HR professionals develop policies and procedures, benefits and pay practices that can be very complicated. There are legal and tax aspects to almost everything in HR, which often make it difficult for the average employee to understand even the basics. Employees and managers, after all, are busy working on their own deadlines and goals.

I think my HR clients have depended on me to:

• Listen to what they need to communicate and “interpret” the information so that busy employees can understand the company’s policies and benefits. I don’t think that employee handbooks have to be written in “legalese.” They should be reviewed by an attorney, but it’s okay write the policies in everyday language that employees can read easily and understand.
• Develop a communications strategy that delivers the message to employees multiple times, in multiple formats, not to harass employees, but to ensure that they get the message. As adults, we have to be told something several times before it sinks in. (If you’re a parent of a teenager, I bet you can relate to that.)
• “Advertise” their successes to get “buy-in” from employees and managers. (Why should I use that corporate recruiter–I can do it on my own! We know you can, but the recruiter can do it in half the time and at cost savings.)

I’ve seen HR departments communicate with lots of paper, lots of emails and lots of exclamation points. It works. They deliver the message. However, an employee communicator can consolidate delivery and ensure consistent messaging, which means employees “get it,” and they get it with fewer emails and fewer questions and in less time.

There’s an additional benefit–adding an employee communications professional to your HR team gives HR professionals more time to focus on HR issues (and we all know there are lots of those).

You have to find a replacement, and that takes time and money. You’ve got to advertise for the job, sort through the resumes, have a couple of rounds of interviews (I know one hiring manager who recently planned to do 25 first interviews. Assuming each interview took no more than an hour, she cost the company around $750 just for the interview time.), make an offer, negotiate salary and benefits, and then it still takes time to get the new hire “up-to-speed.” Who has time for that?

You can avoid losing talented employees if you create the right workplace environment–one where employees feel appreciated and respected. I know “all the generations are different,” but I think all of us, from Traditionalists to Gen Ys, want respect and recognition for the contributions we make. Do you treat your employees with respect? Do you treat them as the adults they are? Do they think you do?

If you don’t know what your employees think about their jobs, it’s okay to ask. You have permission—as long as you’re prepared to act on what they say. Meet with them individually, and ask, “What do you like about your job?” or “What challenges or interests you at work?” or maybe “What ideas or suggestions do you have that would improve our productivity or customer service?” Listen to the responses. Take action. Your employees will realize they are making a contribution to your company’s success. That’s empowering and engaging. It’s what Connecting Your Employees to Your Business © is all about.