5 Steps To Improve Team Engagement

5 steps to improve team engagement: Lessons from one of our clients

Every business lives and dies through its team.?

If your team are not performing, or if you have noticed a drop in productivity, it will eventually impact your bottom line.

Likewise, if you are looking to grow your business, your existing team (and any hires you make) need to be as engaged as possible, so you can maximise output.

In preparing for our next free seminar, focusing on improving team engagement , we recently reflected on the benefits we have had with our clients and the impact our founder has had during his last three decades working in executive development.

5 steps to improve team engagement as you grow your business:

A data analytics business looking to improve team engagement:

In this article, we look at the example of a data analytics business looking to:

?? Improve team engagement, and?

?? Reduce friction

More importantly for you though, in this article you will discover:

?? The 5 steps we took them through to achieve that, and

?? How you can implement these steps in your business

Step 1: Awareness of the situation in the business:

When the owner of this business initially spoke to us, he wanted to better understand the makeup of his team, identify what gaps there were (if any), raise awareness of the psyche within the business, and create a buzz.

He also wanted to get the team more engaged and help them to work more effectively together. He was noticing that a mix of personalities was causing friction between team members.

We have previously outlined the importance of stepping off the hamster wheel in your business , so that you can get a helicopter view of what’s going on and an awareness of:

?? Challenges and areas to make improvements, and

?? Successes, and how to build on what’s going well

This client was no different, and after taking that step back the owner noticed the sources of friction, and wanted to dig deeper to seek a solution, rather than let it continue.

How can this help you?

In our experience, the best results come from consistency, and the clients that have small but regular time away from the day-to-day hustle and bustle of their business see the most progress.

The following are two easy questions you can ask yourself:

• How often do you take a step back and analyse what’s going well and what can be improved in your business?
• If and when you take a step back, how long is it for, and is it enough time??

Step 2: Improving team engagement starts with individuals

In order to start improving team engagement, each person within the business, including the management team, had to understand their individual characters.

By understanding your own character and your dominant brain , you can begin to piece together the kind of people you need around you to help you grow.

The way we do this is to have each person take our Perfect Teams profiling indicator.

(To better understand this, direct message our founder today with the word ‘indicator’ to organise a free one for you)

What can you learn from this?

We might be biased, but whether you use our tool or another one, we recommend that you have as detailed insights as possible about your team members.

Not only will it support your overall team engagement, productivity and bottom line in the long run, but it will also support the individual team members as they plan their career development.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• If you could only pick one, which of the following places do you focus your energy most of the time- on process, relationships or on gut intuition?
• How do you primarily like to process information? Do you prefer detailed information, or high level summaries? How do you prefer to communicate?

Step 3: Reducing friction through a change in culture

Once everyone had an understanding of their own characters, we then ran a workshop with everyone in the team, to start an open conversation.

Our workshops support the beginning of a cultural shift within teams and businesses, because they get each person out of their own heads and into something that they are experiencing together with all of their colleagues.

It was the same for this data analytics business, and during this conversation the sales director remarked, “Finally a personality theory that I actually understand.”

During the workshop there was a recognition that the team was so focused on delivering the work, that there was no culture around it.?

They also started realising that if they didn’t attend to that, they would end up with people issues, and became aware of the lack- and importance of- the caring characteristics in the team.

In short, they realised there was a need for a ‘Social-Secretary’ type person to ensure they did things together more, and build culture..

What can you learn from this?

It’s very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day focus on delivering and delegating tasks to team members, but how often do you focus on the relationships between team members?

Other questions to ask yourself here are:

• How often do you bring your team together to have open and honest conversations?
• How well do you understand your individual team members, their focus, and their preferred communication style???

Step 4: Debrief and planning

After analysing the individual reports, the outputs from the workshop, and compiling a ‘Team-Map’, we were able to enter step 4, which is about debriefing and planning for the future.

(In case you are unaware, our ‘Team-Maps’ take individual profiles to a new level, because you can start to identify hidden talents and the gaps that exist in your team. To better understand this, direct message our founder today with the word ‘Map’ to organise one for you)

At the beginning of the debrief, which we held a week later with the business owner and his leadership team, they reported that there was now less friction among the team.

The debrief highlighted (as the workshop did) that the business was heavily dominated by team members solely focused on process and delivery.?

It also showed that the sales director was the only commercially-focused person in the core team, which meant that his character constantly clashed with the process-driven delivery team. Aside from the sales director, the team had very little, if any, urgency around sales.

When it came to planning for the future, it became clear to the leadership team that they needed to recruit characters that were focused on relationships, networking, business development and sales.

What can you learn from this?

Very simply, investing in your team and working with an expert who has a fresh pair of eyes, means you get impartial advice based on best practice.

How are you investing in your business to improve team engagement and grow, specifically with someone who has a fresh pair of eyes?

Step 5: Recruitment

Since the team workshop (and the debrief that followed it) the business owner has started using the indicator as a way to identify if candidates match the kind of characters they are looking for, to plug the gaps they have.

They recently hired a new commercially-focused person for example, and the business owner has spoken to our founder about how they can best integrate him into the team and help him succeed.

What can you learn from this?

Before you think about recruiting, it’s important to identify any hidden talents you have in your business, as there may be ways to redeploy existing talent.

Once you have done this, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at how long and how effective your recruitment process is.

A number of our clients now utilise our profiling indicator within their recruitment process because it helps identify whether the person’s character will be suitable for the role or not , and helps them to reduce the time invested in their recruitment process.

Ask yourself this question today: How efficient is your recruitment process?

Summary:

Our founder Neil, and our team, have over thirty years of experience in executive development and have worked with more than 6,760 business owners and leaders to improve team engagement and productivity .

With this in mind, there are two ways we can help you improve team engagement and productivity in your business right now:

1. Book your free ticket to our next executive seminar - the topic of which is improving team engagement
2. Direct message our founder today with the word ‘indicator’ to organise your own, free, profiling indictor