How to create a Highly Engaged Team

Engagement is a method for connecting with your team members and connecting their work to both your needs and those of the organization. Team member engagement is when a team member is emotionally and behaviourally connected to their job; it shows their investment in their workplace.

Engaged team members are highly focused and intensely involved in their work. They are enthusiastic with a sense of urgency. Engaged behaviour is persistent, proactive, and adaptive in ways that expand job roles. Engaged team members go beyond their job descriptions; they feel focused and concentrate on how they approach what they do - satisfied team members feel pleasant, content, and gratified.

Engaged team members produce superior results, are more productive, loyal and stay at an organisation longer, linking team member engagement to better business outcomes. Based on over 50 years of team member engagement research, Gallup has shown that engaged team members produce better business outcomes than others - across industry, company size and nationality, and in good economic times and bad. Business units in the top quartile of?Gallup's global employee engagement database, for instance, are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile.

There are three forms of Engagement:

1.???Engaged team members are highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace. They are psychological ‘owners’ who drive high performance and innovation and move the organisation forward.

2.???Non-Engaged team members are psychologically unattached to their work and their company because their engagement needs are not being met; they're putting in time but not energy or passion into their work.

3.???Actively Disengaged team members are unhappy at work; they are resentful that their needs aren't being met and act out their unhappiness accordingly. Every day, these team members potentially undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish.

Disengaged team members feel no real connection to their jobs and tend to do the bare minimum; they do as little as possible to get by. Disengagement can show in several ways, a 9-to-5 clock mentality or a tendency to separate oneself from other team members. It becomes most noticeable when someone who's ordinarily outgoing and enthusiastic seems to fall by the wayside and has nothing positive to contribute. They may resent their jobs, tend to gripe to co-workers and drag down office morale.

Your Teams level of Engagement

To get a deeper understanding of your team’s current level of engagement, consider how your team members would answer the following questions:

1.???Does your manager understand your out-of-work stresses and obligations?

2.???Do you know what is expected of you at work?

3.???Do you have the materials and equipment to do your work right?

4.???At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?

5.???In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?

6.???Does your supervisor or someone at work seem to care about you as a person?

7.???Is there someone at work who encourages your development?

8.???At work, do your opinions seem to count?

9.???Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?

10. Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?

11. Do you have a best friend at work?

12. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?

13. In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?

Your Role as Manager

Engagement levels are significantly influenced by the manager (through job assignments, trust, recognition, day-to-day communications, and so on.) When a manager doesn't meet with team members one-on-one or at all or neglects to provide on-the-job training, team members will view that manager unfavourably compared to those who meet with their managers regularly. Team member engagement increases dramatically when the daily experiences of team members include positive relationships with their manager. Managers who regularly meet with their team members triple the level of their engagement.

Team members want relationships, particularly with a manager who can coach them to the next level. Between regular meetings and touch bases, one-on-ones let managers see the full spectrum of the work their team is working on. The manager is, after all, the one who sets expectations, highlights opportunities, improves collaboration, and often distributes the workload. This can only happen successfully when the manager is involved in and engaged with the team.

Managers are mentors who need to focus on the individual needs of each team member. It is also important for managers to be able to flex their mentoring styles - for example, the needs of individual team members may require a manager to be a "teaching" mentor where the manager passes along expertise on how to achieve something or a "facilitating mentor" where the manager asks questions and listens instead of telling or giving answers.

Your most valuable assets are your team members. Disengaged team members feel miserable while at work, and that misery follows them home, compounding their stress and negatively affecting their overall well-being. Team member engagement should be a manager's primary responsibility.

When team members have the materials and equipment, they need to do their job right; they care more about the fate of your organisation. High-performance managers need to build genuine relationships with their team members. The best managers understand that each team member is different, and that each has various successes and challenges. Knowing their team members as people first, these managers accommodate their team members' uniqueness while managing them toward high performance.

How much of your time do you spend working on your team member relationships? Building strong professional relationships and an environment of trust and respect takes time and effort, but it pays huge dividends in performance. Team member engagement is accomplished by doing regular Check-Ins, giving feedback, and providing autonomy and empowerment.

Regular Check-Ins

Check-Ins are one-hour sessions best held fortnightly that are a vital part of the team member/manager relationship. It's where team members get individualised attention, and the manager provides mentoring. It provides you with a management tool to develop your team members to their fullest potential. This is a free-form meeting for all the pressing work issues, ideas and frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.

When managers hold regular one-on-one meetings with team members, they gain insights about them which helps to build stronger, higher-performing teams. Team members in return, feel that someone cares about them as people and cares about their personal development. The more conversations managers have with their team members, the more engaged they become.

Holding Check-Ins also means that status or progress reports can be dispensed with.

Regular Check-Ins help you stay in the loop, alerting you to potential problems at an early stage so that you can step in, correct, or influence events before things get out of control. The overall objective is to build a supportive and trusted relationship and discuss and influence your team members toward improved 'work performance' with positive outcomes. It is also the opportunity to motivate team members to continue with newly learned behaviours that increase their effectiveness and stop behaviours that reduce their effectiveness.

Giving this kind of feedback consistently and well establishes and strengthens trust. The more trust and rapport you can build, the more readily your team members will adopt the new behaviours, accept, and act on feedback, creating a pattern of learning and growth. It is important to have genuine conversations about performance with the intent of getting a team member to improve. All feedback is an opportunity to improve.

How to run a Check-In

Set up a one-on-one meeting with each team member using this broad agenda:

1.???To get to know the team member better.

2.???Review work progress.

3.???Resolve any issues.

4.???Remove roadblocks.

5.???Understand out of work stresses and obligations.

6.???Discuss personal development.

Recognise that team members have individual differences in terms of needs and desires, aim to challenge them with stretch tasks by exploiting their strengths. Accept that there will be individual differences between team members (e.g., some team members require more encouragement, some more autonomy, others firmer standards, and still others more task structure). Aim to understand their preferred working style and what they do best as this is an area you need to focus on in terms of achieving high engagement and job satisfaction. Hold team members accountable for quality work and deadlines but give them the freedom to determine how to do their job. Tell them what you want, but not how to do it.

Suggested Approach

1.???Open by asking the team member what their top three issues are.

2.???Discuss something that the team member recently did well.

3.???Discuss projects, activities they are involved with.

4.???Discuss team dynamics, how well the team is working together and how well new behaviours and training is going.

5.??? Give updates about any new company, team, or project-related news.

6.???Discuss a personal development plan. What are the team members training needs? What are their aspirations and are they realistic? What do you both need to do to help the team member achieve their goals? A personal development plan can be as simple as a list of actions and goals.

7.???Include an informal performance review, making positive comments like "I think you're doing a great job." and any negative observations such as saying, “That last email you sent me was far too long.” - address failings by talking about how to address them.

8.???Agree on follow-up actions.

Make Check-Ins a Priority

Make holding Check-Ins a priority. Remember that this interaction is being held for the team member’s benefit, so they need to talk to you about their work, the challenges they face and any professional issues. Make sure you ask questions to understand better what they are trying to say.?

Check-Ins can replace Annual Performance Appraisals

Check-In sessions can replace annual appraisals because engagement more closely follows the natural work cycle. When rapid innovation is a source of competitive advantage, as it is now in many companies and industries, that means future needs are continually changing. Because organisations won't necessarily want employees to keep doing the same things, it doesn't make sense to hang on to a system built mainly to assess and hold people accountable for past or current practices.

Businesses no longer have clear annual cycles. Instead, projects are short-term and tend to change along the way, so employees' goals and tasks can't be plotted out a year in advance with much accuracy. In the words of one Deloitte manager: "The conversations are more holistic. They're about goals and strengths, not just about past performance. Trust people, not policies. Reward candour and throw away the standard playbook.”

While team members need to be held accountable for their results, most people perform best when given tools to succeed and coaching to improve performance. Companies that have re-engineered their performance review processes and have eliminated ratings have found substantial improvements in engagement and performance as a result. Shifting away from annual performance appraisals toward a process of continuous coaching and development is a new role for managers. Ideally, conversations between managers and team members occur when projects finish, milestones are reached, challenges pop up, and so forth, allowing people to solve problems in current performance while also developing skills for the future.

Moving away from the traditional focus on individual accountability (the annual appraisal) makes it easier to foster and evaluate teamwork especially given that the move toward team-based work often conflicted with individual appraisals and rewards. Now that the labour market has tightened and keeping good people is once again critical, many companies have been trying to eliminate "dissatisfiers" that drive team members away. Naturally, annual reviews are on that list since the process is widely reviled, and focusing on numerical ratings interferes with people's learning. Replacing this system with feedback delivered right after client engagements and project completions helps managers do better coaching and allows your team members to process and apply the advice more effectively.

Engagement means giving Autonomy and Empowerment

Team members who do not have autonomy or empowerment require external motivation, whereas team members who do possess autonomy and empowerment do not. Autonomy and empowerment are critical attributes of high-performing teams; without them, you have frustrated team members who are constantly reminded that they're not trusted to make even small decisions let alone the bigger ones; this saps motivation and leads to resentment.?

Do your team members make decisions on their own? Or do you have the final say on every or most decisions? If you fall into the latter, you're hindering your team's ability to get results. If every decision must go through you, this slows workflow often with your team's work grinding to a halt. Furthermore, not allowing team members to make decisions demonstrates a lack of trust. You're telling them that you doubt their abilities to make the right choices.?

Remove as many barriers and constraints as possible imposed on your team members. Then tell them, “You have my permission and support to do as you need”. You can then tell if they are feeling and acting in an autonomous and empowered manner because if they are, they will reduce how often they email you because there is simply no need.

Feedback and the role of Recognition

Team members work best when they are using their strengths, and a person’s strengths aren’t always on display. Sometimes they require a precise trigger to turn them on. Squeeze the right trigger, and a person will push themselves harder and persevere in the face of resistance. Squeeze the wrong one, and the person may well shut down.

The most powerful trigger is feedback and recognition. Great managers refine and extend this insight. They realize that each team member plays to a slightly different tune and audience. To excel as a manager, you must be able to match the team member to the audience they value the most. One audience might be their peers, in which case the best way to praise them would be to publicly celebrate an achievement. Another audience might be you; the most powerful recognition, in this case, would be a one-on-one conversation where you tell the team member quietly but vividly why they are such a valuable team member. Another team member might see the best form of recognition as some type of professional or technical award. Yet another might value feedback only from customers.

Listen to the Team

Your job is to provide direction, guidance, and support because you can see further ahead of the team. It is up to you to remove roadblocks. Listen to what your team are telling you and act on what you hear. Help them to be successful. Give honest, direct, frank feedback on their performance and insist on practising the new training program behaviours.

Constantly offer Help

After every conversation – offer your help. Interestingly, this rarely, if ever, gets asked for – but knowing that it is available to them is your way of saying, “I’m here to support you always; I have your back.”

Engagement means having an Open-Door Policy

There are only two reasons to have your office door closed:

1.???To tell team members to keep away from you, which you never want to do.

2.???To do urgent work to the extent that you cannot handle an interruption.

I consider option 2 as the only valid option. Leaving your office door open always is a way of publicly and privately stating that you want people to approach you, give you unsolicited feedback or drop in for a chat. You must always be approachable; any barrier you put up is a roadblock to communicating with you; a closed-door also is a way of telling team members that they are less than you, that is, they do not command the same value as you.

Engagement means being close to Remote Team Members

Consider communication with team members who work remotely; the best way to keep in touch is by having frequent face time meetings (and two-monthly in-person meetings). When managers understand the importance of their relationship with their remote team members, they begin to individualise their approach to helping these team members achieve higher performance and encourage collaboration and teamwork.

High-performance managers need to understand that remote team members' expectations are different from office workers' expectations, especially if remote team members feel isolated, which can result in as much as a 21% drop in performance. High-performance managers can't manage the modern remote workforce using a traditional management approach. Here are some ways to defeat isolation and increase engagement.

Defeat negative misperceptions of remote team members

A negative misperception of remote team members is that they are less productive and collaborative than office employees. High-performance managers recognise that most remote team members are mostly 25% more productive than their in-office colleagues.

Know your team members

High-performance managers need to take the time to understand their remote team members, especially how they prefer to communicate and to discover how they think and respond to specific kinds of workplace situations.

1.???Identify your remote team members' strengths (natural talents), so you know how they work best.

2. Whom do they prefer to work with most often?

3.???Which of their working partnerships produces the best results?

4.???Make sure the remote team member understands your expectations of them and their work. Set clear expectations indicating your attention to, understanding of and respect for their job role.

5.???Provide support, equipment, and information. It is extremely frustrating when held back by inadequate resources and support. You must ensure that remote team members have the materials, equipment, and information they need to do their job. Connect remote team members to colleagues doing similar work and ensure that remote team members are a part of team meetings to foster a sense of connectedness and belonging.

Lastly

1.???Use Check-Ins to reinforce new behaviours learned from this training program.

2.???Without a mutually understood agreement to speak freely, the relationship with your team members is unlikely to reach its full potential. Commit to honesty. Both parties should be prepared to offer frank feedback as appropriate, even if the feedback is critical. Listen and learn. Managers especially need to remember that the relationship is not primarily about them. These sessions should reveal team members preferred working styles and as mentioned, professional aspirations. You are their role model, lead by example, remembering that your words and actions will create a lasting impression and will be copied.

3.???Be careful of language; for example, never criticise anyone even when the situation warrants it. Instead, tell them that you have an observation to make, albeit negative. The word 'criticism' or being perceived as critical turns people off; they stop listening and are unlikely to take on board what you have to say. If, for example, you have made the same mistake yourself at some time or exhibited the same poor behaviour that you have 'observed', say so; it builds trust and reiterates that we all learn from our mistakes.