As a leader, how can you connect employees with the organisation?

Organisations are keen to improve the connection between employees and the organisation, for example to retain employees for longer, attract new people and achieve sustainable cooperation. As a leader, what can you do to promote connection and loyalty to the organisation?

The value of connection within the organisation

The survival of organisations depends for a significant part on the loyalty of its employees. Human resources are scarce; people change employers easily. How can you develop sustainably as an organisation if people keep leaving and teams are understaffed or constantly changing in composition?

Connection is therefore of great value to leaders and organisations. Organisations try to attract and retain people with extensive onboarding programmes, good secondary benefits and bonuses if they manage to bring in new colleagues. Yet that is not where the connection lies. It lies in the undercurrent. In the unwritten rules, the culture and the collective memory – of the organisation and the people within it.

As a leader, how do you create the foundation for sustainable connection?

The best and most sustainable interaction occurs when you encourage a healthy connection between people and teams.

As a leader, you can preventively stimulate this connection by:

• Keeping an eye on the balance between giving and taking. This balance is a prerequisite for a healthy connection. If employees give more than they receive in salary, attention, appreciation, the balance will subconsciously be settled elsewhere.
• Welcome new employees and give them a distinct place within the organisation. The welcome is the start of loyalty to which old pain can easily be projected. A connecting and appropriate welcome can prevent this. With a distinct place within the organisation and a defined set of tasks and responsibilities, you can also prevent employees from carrying someone else’s burden.
• Saying goodbye to services, products or to departing employees, even if a person does not feel the need for it themselves. This is precisely when the leader’s creativity is needed to ensure that not only the employee, but the employee’s team can say goodbye properly as well.
• Visualise the history, including the organisation’s founders. When everything can be in focus – the good, the bad and the ugly – it gives a calmness to the organisational system. Employees need not be subconsciously loyal to ensure that a piece of history is brought back into focus.
• Ensure that the right to exist of the present day, including the acknowledgement of how the organisation has come to this point, resonates everywhere within the organisation. This ensures that employees can connect and contribute of their own accord with the organisation’s right to exist.

These are the interventions with which you, as a leader, contribute to a vital working environment. When you can sustainably connect employees and teams, you are laying the foundation for a stable cooperation and a sustainable organisation.