Striking the balance between being an open, honest, and friendly manager, and still being able to separate yourself from your employees when the going gets tough is more of an art form than anything else.

Whilst socializing with your employees, both inside and outside of the traditional office setting, for example, it is still crucial to be able to be a strict disciplinarian and to never put yourself in a professionally compromising position.

With this in mind, continue reading to learn how to engage with your employees and still maintain your professionalism.

Strive to Include Everyone in Important Business Decisions

It would be frankly incredibly ill-advised to start bringing in every single employee from every single department into senior management meetings to ask for their opinions and to discuss their thoughts.

However, you will develop a much stronger and, indeed, much quicker bond with your staff members if you strive to always notify them of a new change to the business model or how a certain task is approached, whether it affects them or not.

Get to Know Their Individual Wants, Needs & Primary Motivations

Another key way of forming close professional bonds with your department heads and employees within the department is to cultivate a collaborative and meaningful work environment in a professional sense.

Outsourcing key elements of your core HR functions, for example, such as emotional analytics, and investing in employee survey software, will reap the following benefits, to name just a few:

• Copious opportunity for discussion and follow-ups
• A way to identify areas of improvement
• To be able to communicate with employees on a personal and inciteful level
• Vastly improves conversation, communication, and collaboration
• The best way to show your employees that you genuinely care

Autonomy Should be Encouraged

An important factor in designing a more collaborative and respectful working environment is to form strong bonds with your employees and one way to achieve the latter is to strive to implement a higher level of autonomy with each working day.

It is a basic, yet entirely accurate and proven-to-be effective fact that the more space you give your employees to work on their motivation and impetus and the greater the level of trust and respect which you bestow on them, the more satisfied and amiable your workforce will be.

The greater the level of autonomy you bestow upon your employees, the stronger the bond you will form with each of them.

Make One-On-One Interactions Par for the Course

The fourth and final effective way to form a healthy and multi-faceted bond with your permanent members of staff is to ensure to hold one-to-one catch-up, more informal, meetings with each employee.

In addition to official meetings, which are booked possibly days or even weeks in advance, you should also remember to actively, although wholly naturally, seek out more personal one-to-one interactions, whether that be on a staff night out, a training day, or simply at the water cooler on a break.