By Emilie Shoop, Creator and Leader of Shoop Training & Consulting

The Gallup Poll has a list of 12 questions to measure Employee Engagement. One of the questions is:  Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person? Or...Does anyone care if I show up?

This is an extremely powerful question. Can you imagine how the people who answer No to that feel, day in and day out? I can’t. But I have been very close.

One of my jobs I did have an environment where I felt like my manager did not care about me as a person. Nor did it seem like his manager who was the owner of the company cared. Even though I had coworkers who cared, not having that feeling from management was very disheartening. It didn't take long for me, an over achiever, to begin to check out.

I began to have thoughts like…

• If they didn't care about me, why should I care about the job? Why should I do well?
• If they don’t care about me, why should I make “them” any more money?
• If they don’t care about whether or not I show up, why should I be on time?
• And so on.

As a person who loves to work hard, I was absolutely miserable. I tried many ways to make the job work, but in the end it just didn’t. And I’m ok with that.

But what if someone on your team feels like you don’t care about them? What are you doing on a regular basis to show you care?

Here are 3 simple ideas that you can use right now to stay on track.

Listen

Pay attention to what is going on with your team member’s personal life. In the job I spoke of above, I was really struggling with finding out my son was behind and needed to start Early Childhood Education immediately. The work environment I was in did not allow me to share my grief, frustration, concerns, and so on. All day I internalized those feelings, and could have been so much more productive and engaged had I been able to know my management cared.

Ask

Many times people don’t come right out and tell you what’s going on, good or bad, so you need to ask! When I managed a team, we would start our meetings with 3 minutes of happy talk where we could share something good going on. We heard stories from guys that barely spoke, but got excited to share at that moment. It was super fun when one guy used that as his time to tell us his wife was pregnant!

Tell

Take time to make yourself vulnerable. Share something you are struggling with personally. Today I was working with a colleague and opened up and let him know about something I was struggling with. He was able to relate, give me some great ideas on how to move forward, and we now have a stronger working relationship because of it. Letting him see into my world a bit, allowed him to trust me a little more and see where I could help him as well.

In sales, you hear over and over that people buy from those they know, like, and trust. I believe it’s the same for a great working relationship. People work hard for those they know, like, and trust!