The United States Office of Personnel Management recently debuted a new online training course designed to help managers better communicate with their employees. The course, titled Maximizing Employee Engagement, launched January 15 and focuses on helping managers learn how to boost levels of engagement in their workforce. The goal is to help maintain and retain an active, productive workforce in the federal government. “The course is designed to help educate and provide federal leaders with knowledge and strategies to successfully support employee engagement—an objective consistently shown through workplace studies as a critical enabler of organizational success, financial performance, and positive human capital management outcomes in critical areas including recruitment and retention," said Mark Reinhold, associate director of employee services, in a statement. As a complement to the program, on January 12, Beth Cobert, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management,released new guidance for employee engagement that encourages managers to have frequent “light check-ins” with their employees to offer feedback and keep lines of communication open.