4 Ways to Keep Team Members Engaged Across All Working Environments

While companies consider sending their workers to go back to the office full-time, many workers are resisting the change back to pre-pandemic ‘normalcy’.

Around the country, office occupancy rates rose sharply at the start of 2022; however, data from Kastle Systems shows that as of August 2022, occupancy in 10 of the US’s largest businesses centers (e.g. New York, D.C., Los Angeles, etc.) is only 44% of pre-pandemic levels. What’s more is although many workers believed their productivity had increased due to moving to remote working environments, data now shows that in the long-term, productivity is taking a toll .

This resistance to change and downturn in productivity have manifested themselves in what has been dubbed ‘Quiet Quitting’ — a practice through which unmotivated employees in all kinds of working environments do the minimum amount of work possible in order to keep receiving their paychecks.

For business owners — many of whom are already dealing with supply shocks and an economic downturn — this productivity drop is cause for concern. So, if you’re worried about how a downturn in productivity might affect your business, here are four things you can do to improve engagement among your employees and team:

1 | Practice Radical Transparency

As a business owner, making sure that every employee still feels connected to the company’s mission — no matter their geography or how close their position is to delivering on the organization's mission — is vital for engagement and success.

One way you can keep everyone connected to the mission is through the practice of radical transparency. Remember, your mission describes how you are pursuing your long-term goals as a business, and you want every employee to know what role they play and how they can contribute. This builds camaraderie around a shared objective and provides team members with the feeling that they are part of something bigger, because they are.

Simply put, radical transparency requires a dramatic departure from traditional top-down leadership, which often keeps power, knowledge, and vision concentrated within a small section of the organization. Share your vision, connect information across the organization, and empower employees to decide and take action in alignment with your goals and priorities.

If you break the traditional mold, you will empower your team members with the opportunity to find solutions on their own and take ownership of their work, leading to higher levels of engagement – even among remote and hybrid teams.

In The Frontline CEO , I outline how prioritizing four essential actions within your company can help foster a radically transparent culture:

1. Listening to understand.

Open up the doors for two-way communication. This is more difficult with a hybrid team, so you have to spend more time, work in smaller groups so everyone has a chance to engage, and share artifacts from the conversation so people can align around the takeaways.

2. Following through to build trust.

It takes time to earn trust, and it all starts with extending trust to your employees. Make sure everyone knows their role, sets priorities for the week, and works toward specific outcomes. Once that’s done, you should demonstrate trust by giving people space to achieve those outcomes. If the outcomes are not achieved, follow up with a coaching conversation to understand the barriers and work together to address them.

3. Establishing clear expectations.

Establishing expectations goes beyond just setting goals and priorities; it also includes how people work together, demonstrate the values of your organization, and how you communicate. Outline the actions and behaviors that you want your team to tie to your values and culture, and put a consistent communication cadence in place to keep everyone engaged. This could be a weekly individual and/or team check-in, a quarterly employee development conversation focused on helping people achieve their career ambitions, or any other way that will help you build a connection. The key is to be consistent so that people know what to expect and have the ongoing support they need.

4. Encouraging proactive decision-making.

Break down your company’s objectives into team goals, monitor performance, and empower teams to make the course corrections needed to stay on track. Decision-making is a skill that can be developed with repetition. Have your team outline key decisions that need to be made, discuss the pros and cons of different options, gather input from diverse perspectives, then commit to a decision. Going through this process will help people build effective decision-making habits that include evaluating options and collaborating to make informed decisions with ownership achieved by incorporating broad input.

2 | Maintain Alignment Through Change

We live in an age of almost unprecedented change and disruption, making alignment a constant challenge for organizational leaders in both small, medium, and large companies. For companies working with remote and hybrid teams, this sense of misalignment and ‘siloing’ may be exacerbated by the lack of strong communication that can come with these working environments.

Given that misalignment often leads to low engagement and motivation, it’s vital that you put in place structures that will support your company’s objectives and keep your team together in ever-changing times. Fostering frequent and clear communication should serve as your cornerstone for maintaining alignment across your team.

Conduct Visual Meetings

When you use visual aids, team members can see how their contributions show up in the bigger conversation. Visual aids help them see the progression of thoughts during a meeting, allowing them to draw a mental map of the topics you covered.

This could be a PowerPoint presentation or Google Doc that you’re actively updating throughout the conversation, or any number of digital whiteboard tools such as Miro or Vibe that allow you to document a brainstorming session with virtual teams. If you’re working with remote or hybrid teams, consider finding a way to bring team members together for the occasional face-to-face meeting. Remember, if you never meet someone face-to-face, your relationship can only go so far (i.e., body language is 80% of communication and lost when remote).

3 | Show That You Care

Perhaps one of the root causes of the current phenomenon of ‘quiet quitting’ is that employees don’t feel valued and appreciated by their organizations, leading them to express their frustration by doing the minimum possible. Feeling that your organization – especially your team leaders – doesn’t value you can leave a powerful impression.

How do you know if your manager cares? They actively listen and seek to help, check in just to see how you’re doing, and consistently provide feedback that you need to continue to develop.

One of the areas that might feel counterintuitive on this point is providing constructive feedback on the areas you need to improve. These are sometimes uncomfortable conversations that feel disciplinary, but it’s information you need if you want to progress in your career, whatever that means to you.

If you’re a manager, ask where employees want to grow and develop and discuss the skills and leadership attributes they need to get there so they can work on developing those skills. If you’re an employee looking to grow, set up time and ask for feedback. The more you can outline your career objectives, the more clarity you can get on the actions needed to get there.

In order to keep levels of engagement high, you should create a caring culture within your organization, getting to know people, what’s important to them, and where they want to go so you can invest in their success.

Build employee and community engagement plans that align with the hearts and minds of your employees. Get behind employees that are passionate about a cause, have an idea to bring educational opportunities into the company, and take time to celebrate the diversity of your team with heritage month activities throughout the year.?

Creating an inclusive culture is also fundamental to showing employees that you care about them. One way you can do this is by valuing all viewpoints, listening, synthesizing, and encouraging respectful disagreement among your employees. Next time you’re discussing an important decision, make sure you have all perspectives included, and go around one by one to ask for input. Send out background information in advance so everyone can come prepared with a viewpoint, and encourage people to build off each other's ideas.

If your team members feel valued, appreciated, and cared about, they are far more likely to engage with your company’s vision – a win-win for business leaders and team members.

4 | Create a Learning Organization

When stuck in the inertia of repetitive day-to-day tasks, employee engagement can drop off at a rapid pace. If employees don’t feel they are learning and extracting value from their work, they won’t engage in the innovation process, leaving your company behind the competition.

As such, you should strive to create space for people to learn and develop new skills that could include cross-training in different areas of the company, shadowing other employees to better understand what they do, or formal training sessions that cover a variety of topics supporting personal growth.

Encourage employees to develop a personal development plan and position leaders to act as coaches with a toolbox of different development actions they can provide to their employees.

If you’re a larger company, you may have a course catalog offered by your training department or a learning partner such as Degreed.com. You can also have a library of relevant books supported by a book club, monthly lunch and learns where subject matter experts share their knowledge, temporary assignments that allow employees to develop new skills, or any number of on-the-job training activities targeted at skill-building.

?By promoting personal development plans for your employees, they will see that you have the confidence to make an investment in them, providing them with the inner drive to learn, perform, and contribute to your company’s success.

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