6 Traps to Avoid When Creating an Engaged Virtual Team

In today’s virtual work environment, we’ve learned a few things.

In a recent survey conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Bayt.com, revealed employees' preferences in the middle east in the post-pandemic era, with 86% insisting they would like to work entirely virtually.

Allowing employees to?work?remotely can increase their?productivity. A PwC survey found a 47 percent productivity increase in 2020, despite the large rise in working from home. And 94 percent of employers surveyed by Mercer reported productivity was unaffected or improved during the pandemic.

So while working from home presents some challenges, remote workers have proven they can engage at high levels. In remote and hybrid environments, leaders need to be even more intentional about creating the right conditions for high engagement.

The most powerful principles of human motivation are timeless, and they apply in all settings: in-person, remote, or hybrid. As the best leaders know, highly engaged employees are playing a game that matters, and they’re winning.

Dispelling a Few Myths.

Myth 1: Engagement is the same as camaraderie.

When organizations and leaders start to think about engagement, a litany of classic reasons employees quit surfaces. But the reality is that getting along with your boss or having a best friend at work isn’t what drives engagement. Culture consists of camaraderie and engagement.

Myth 2: Money and prestige are the biggest motivators.

As Frederick Herzberg explained in the 1960s, improving what he called hygiene factors — like status, compensation, or benefits — doesn’t mean you’ll love your job. When hygiene factors are missing, their absence leads to dissatisfaction. But their presence doesn’t guarantee engagement. We all know miserable people in high paying, prestigious jobs.

Myth 3: Engagement is the same as employee satisfaction.

People love their job because of what Herzberg called the motivation factors: challenging work, responsibility, and purpose. Motivation factors are intrinsic. No prodding required. Reflect on a time during your career when you were most engaged, a time when you were most enthralled. Chances are that moment had nothing to do with pay, benefits, or even your boss. It had everything to do with the feeling you were winning at something that mattered.?

The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.” —Clayton Christensen, author of How Will You Measure Your Life?

The Secret: A High-Stakes, Winnable Game

The most effective leaders engage their employees in a high-stakes, winnable game. Every member of their team or organization feels that what they’re doing every day matters — and that their work is moving the team closer to a Wildly Important Goal? (WIG?).

To create and maintain a highly-engaged team or a highly-engaged organization, leaders must avoid these 6 traps:

1. The Concept Trap

Start with the target, not a concept. A concept is ambiguous. A target is specific. A concept is an idea. No matter how great your idea is, without a clearly defined target, you won’t hit the bullseye — especially in a rapidly changing environment

2. The Complexity Trap

The quickest way to kill execution is to lose focus or over-goal your team or organization. If you want your people to do something spectacularly useful and productive with their time, give them an ambitious target and keep it simple. Don’t add a prescriptive list of dos and don’ts, or your Wildly Important Goal will never get any traction.?

Execution does not like complexity.

3. The Futility Trap

A remote or hybrid work environment can feel like working in isolation. But it doesn’t have to feel isolating, and it won’t if team members have clarity about their purpose. Small wins are where improvement comes from.

You’re not doing people a favor when it’s just all ‘day job’ all the time.” —Chris McChesney, author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution

4. The Urgency Trap

In the absence of focus and discipline, urgency — not importance — dominates human behavior. High performing leaders and team members avoid the trap of only spending energy on the urgent.

Great leaders understand that even if people are in agreement about what matters, until they’ve activated that sense of importance, the whirlwind very easily consumes all of their time and energy — and that of their team members.

Having a well-articulated target helps team members focus and allows them to act instead of being acted upon. They’re equipped to be proactive rather than reactive. Everyone agrees on what’s critically important, and it gets done.

5. The Planning Trap

Change is constant, and organizations that adapt to rapidly changing environments are the best positioned to weather the disruption. When organizations can pivot and adapt, business outcomes that could have been tepid often exceed expectations, month over month and year over year.

So often leaders and managers want to map out a detailed plan, which is the appropriate response in a lot of situations. But for a goal that requires a high level of team engagement — especially in an uncertain environment — it’s much better to point people in the direction of the target and let them figure out how to get there. Strategic leaders allow the teams closest to the work to define targets that support the larger goal, create lead measures, and set up a game with a compelling scoreboard.

Creating a plan yourself and expecting other people to just execute it doesn’t lead to engagement.

6. The Ambiguity Trap

The human brain can only handle so much ambiguity. Today’s workers are packing around a lot of uncertainty baggage. Avoid ambiguity, and your team members won’t have to decide what to make room for. Without clarity, employee engagement nose-dives. People simply check out because they cannot connect the dots. They may hear what a leader is saying, but without knowing what’s actually expected of them, they become apathetic.

*Note that while all 6 traps apply to leaders at any level, Traps 1 to 3 are especially relevant to senior leaders, while Traps 4 to 6 are especially relevant to line managers.?

In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” —Mark Josie, SVP, Business Outcomes, FranklinCovey

Written by Chris McChesney Author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution, and Global Practice Leader & Mark Josie, FranklinCovey Senior Vice President, Business Outcomes, FranklinCovey.

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