Shveta Miglani, PhD, has stopped responding to messages after work. Her reasoning: Not only does it cut into her personal time, it creates a bad example, especially since she manages people in her role as head of people experience and learning at Micron Technology. The more she’s asked to engage outside of work hours, and the more she asks her staff to engage outside of work hours, the less engaged they’ll be at work, Miglani believes. Just as employees are seeking work-life balance, companies have to find a balance in terms of what they recognize: contributions in the workplace as well as the need for personal time.

Miglani understands this: Employers with disengaged workforces will lose employees to the Great Resignation. Jim Harter, chief scientist of workplace management and well-being at Gallup, wrote, “Among actively disengaged workers in 2021, 74% are either actively looking for new employment or watching for openings. This compares with 55% of not engaged employees and 30% of engaged employees.”

Recognition and engagement are related. Organizations that rate their culture of recognition highly are 2.5 times more likely to see increased employee engagement and three times more likely to see increased employee retention, according to a report conducted by Achievers, an employee-experience platform. Gallup calls individualized employee recognition a “low cost, high impact” way to keep workers around.

As part of a panel titled “Bridging the Distance: How Tech Can Boost Engagement and Recognition,” which I moderated for From Day One’s November virtual conference on upskilling, coaching, and recognition, the speakers offered advice on how employers, and managers specifically, can recognize and engage employees to curb attrition.

How Burnout Contributes to Disengagement

Companies need to allay burnout to improve engagement. Donna DiMenna, PsyD, the global director of leadership and talent development at the health-tech company Medtronic, brought up the cost of working from home and therefore having a weak partition between work life and home life. She believes leaders should be honest about how people are handling remote and hybrid work environments. “What stories are we telling ourselves about whether people are in good shape or not in good shape?” she asked. “We need some boundaries and defenses as human beings.”

One way to gauge how well folks are handling the upset in work-life balance is to make sure there's face-to-face contact, even if it's virtual. “You need to be emotionally intelligent to observe people on Zoom meetings and team meetings to see, what's their body language? What are the people feeling? How are they doing? Those skills are very important for managers,” said Madhukar Govindaraju, the CEO at the digital coaching platform Numly.

Lia Garvin, a leadership coach and a senior team operations leader at Google, echoed Miglani’s philosophy about setting and enforcing boundaries. Garvin’s advice for managers: Instead of defaulting to 30-minute meetings, default to ten-minute meetings. Rather than scheduling meetings back to back, relegate meetings to specific days of the week or build in five-minute buffers on either side.

“I had to pause,” said Miglani, reflecting on her influence as a leader. “Just because we are the extension of our technology does not mean that if I am cooking dinner and something blinks on my phone, I should respond. If I’m doing that at night or early in the morning and my team can see it, then I’m sending the wrong message.”

When it comes to communication, quality should trump quantity, the speakers said. That means less contact outside work hours, fewer unnecessary activities, and fewer compulsory events. “I don't want to go to a well-being meeting when I'm completely burned out. I want to take a walk outside,” Garvin said. It’s that breathing room, reinforced by management, that helps employees stay focused during their working hours.

Recognizing Staff Contributions

Staff members look to leadership for recognition, and precedent can be set here too. “Leaders get what they tolerate, right?” said DiMenna. “If we tolerate people being compliant and doing what they're told, maybe they get recognition points at the end of the day, but it's not very satisfying. My experience is that people want to be recognized for working hard, but I think we need to recognize the right things. I was on a call earlier today where somebody got recognized because they were working on vacation.” Bad precedent, she argued. The more you ask employees to engage beyond normal work responsibilities, the more they get the sense that the work they do isn’t enough.

Garvin said it’s important to make sure all work is seen, even what goes on behind the scenes. Virtual working environments require leaders to be more deliberate about how they seek out and recognize often invisible work. “I think part of our jobs as team members and managers is learning what works for our team members and asking them–and making sure that how we recognize them has landed.” Asking for this kind of feedback from direct reports is a way to build trust, which can buoy engagement.

The Role of Coaching in Recognition

Govindaraju said he’s found that two things, in particular, increase engagement: employees trusting management and feeling like they have opportunities to grow their skills. Both can be particularly challenging when there's little or no in-person contact.

Govindaraju said that to achieve both, companies should adopt a coaching culture. And a good coach must be a good communicator, he said. “It’s about creating a culture where coaching becomes a habit. When we engage teams with a coaching mindset and take off your manager hat–forget your project-status discussions and put on a coaching hat–then teams feel empowered to have other conversations outside of the context of project updates.”

He recommends reverse mentoring and peer coaching to awaken new skills. “As a manager, I used to seek out my team for input regularly, and that helped me develop. I would say 90% of reverse mentoring was not mentoring, it was actually engagement. It was actually a more deliberate way to engage the teams. It helped me personally and it clearly helped engagement, as well,” he said. “Peer coaching is about getting individuals within the teams working together, learning from each other, coaching each other. There's no hierarchy.”

As a manager deepens their network of connection in their company, they should engage non-leaders to help make decisions. Miglani encouraged leaders to start at any level. “People who influence within the different ranks of the organization, you should definitely bring them in, you should ask their input, and reach out to them.”

Garvin said she has felt most effective as a leader in situations where she has been allowed to bring her personal values to decision-making. “I thrived. I did really great,” she said. “I wanted to stay there. I was able to achieve things never possible before. [However], on teams that said, ‘We need to get the work done and focus on the people stuff later,’ I felt really stuck.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.