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You're listening to the MentalNotes podcast. In this episode, MentalNotes founder Scott Dow explains how to keep your employees highly engaged.

I have an important statistic and it's probably going to surprise you. On average, only one out of every three employees is giving their best effort. Two out of three are either totally checked out or they're just skating by. Now, that's not our research, that's research from Gallup, and it's pretty consistent with all the other research out there.

Now, you might say that your team's different or that your company's different, but it's probably not. COVID has changed things, and managing remote workers can be a huge challenge. The fact is day to day, we don't really know how engaged our employees really are. But if you're going to deliver results, you need your employees to give their best effort day in and day out. And if they're not, you're fighting for results with one arm tied behind your back.

Now, keeping people engaged is a lot like saving money. Little investments you make are going to compound over time. To stay engaged, people need something called psychological capital. Think of this as a positive can-do mindset. And it has four ingredients: hope, confidence, resilience, and optimism. These are the psychological resources to keep people engaged. If you're investing in people, they build up this positive psychological capital. If you don't, their emotional bank accounts are going to run dry and that's when they disengage.

If you save a little bit out of every paycheck, your savings will compound and grow quickly. When you need your rainy-day fund, it's going to be there. Psychological capital grows the same way. Little day-to-day investments in your people are going to compound over time. And when the work gets hard, your people are going to have the psychological resources they need to keep going. And again, these resources are hope, confidence, resilience, and optimism.

So how do you make these little investments? Well, there are four things that work: focus, feedback, fixes, and frequency. When you focus people on shorter term goals, you build hope because the goal seems more attainable. When you give feedback, you build confidence because you reduce uncertainty. When you fix problems, you build resilience because everything begins to feel fixable. And when you engage frequently, you build optimism. Frequent interaction demonstrates your optimism, and optimism is contagious.

Now, there are a lot of other little things you can do to build up their savings account. We have more detailed explanations on mentalnotes.com. Just search the term savings account on mentalnotes.com.

Remember this. People follow leaders they view to be trustworthy, compassionate, and consistent, and they form this opinion over time. The more engaged you are, the more engaged they'll be. The more investment in them, the more they'll have to give back.

So remember, go to mentalnotes.com, and on mentalnotes.com, search savings account, and start making these little investments.