A Primer on Boosting Micro-Involvement for Community Engagement

The way businesses operate is constantly evolving. Today, a much greater need is being felt for higher involvement and collaboration among the various stakeholders of a business (such as the leadership, executives, clients, and customers).?

In this aspect, businesses can learn a lesson from how people engage with each other in their daily lives. Technology has changed how we communicate, especially in the post-Covid world. We use emojis, social media, video chat, and so on to express ourselves. The way we get involved in our communities has also changed. A major part of engagement now happens on virtual groups (like a Facebook group or a WhatsApp group), email chains, and influencer-led communities. People are more in touch with the businesses they patronize, thanks to social media.?

Employees also want to be involved with business decision-making. They don’t just want to follow-the-leader, but take more ownership regarding the company’s goals. However, employees want to do so as an integral part of their daily work rather than sit in a day-long strategy session once a month.?

This is where micro-engagement can come into play.?

Macro-Engagement vs. Micro-Engagement?

Before we dive into how micro-engagement can help boost community involvement, we need to understand the difference between macro-engagement and micro-engagement.?

Macro-engagement refers to formal engagements (such as strategy meetings or conferences) that seek to inform and involve all the relevant stakeholders. Macro-engagement seeks to foster participation during these more formal occasions. A series of such engagements can thus be used to help bring all stakeholders to the same page and motivate them towards a common destination.?

In contrast, micro-engagements refers to involvement on a daily level. Say, your manager took the time out to speak to you every day about the business and what the team is hoping to achieve and how they’re going to do it. Micro-engagement asks more from leaders as well as executives, but it can also be far more rewarding. Micro-engagements can be a robust tool to improve productivity because it makes executives feel more involved and they can take greater ownership of their work.?

Both macro-engagement and micro-engagement work towards helping create a positive and creative work environment. The role of managers and leaders cannot be overstated in either strategy. The overall work culture depends on their leadership skills and their ability to engage with all stakeholders.???????

Accelerating Community Engagement?

We can use tiny engagements as a way to bring all stakeholders on a collective journey. For example, water-cooler chats or regular updates on a Slack group can help executives relate and belong more with their projects, and leaders can get real-time feedback on their business decisions, modus operandi, and goals.?

The days when speaker events or team offsites could be used as effective engagement techniques have passed us by. Nowadays, the best way to communicate and to foster engaged communities is by leveraging the tech people are used to using.?

That said, leaders should understand that micro-engagement cannot operate in a vacuum. It is just one of the communication tools that should be used to carry everyone towards business goals. Micro-engagement is not the goal, it is just a good way to get there.?

Every leader has the freedom to experiment with micro-engagements to find the path that suits them and their team the most. Of course, there is no single right answer when it comes to the way micro-engagement should be integrated.

Current Practices and Personal Experiences?

A great way to understand micro-engagement is through a real-world example. Sina Farzaneh from PullPath tells us the story of a start-up that has been experimenting with micro-engagement. This start-up operates an app which helps with post-surgery patient care.?

Nurses working for the start-up would text patients on a regular basis to see how they were doing and encourage them to engage on the online platform. It was found that after four weeks, there was no need for nurses to further initiate conversations with patients. Engagement from patients remained at 90% even after direct messages from the nurses stopped.?

This clearly shows us the benefits of micro-engagement. A thriving community of patients supporting each other was built simply through micro-engagement. If inculcated properly, micro-engagement can help businesses reach their goals as well as create great working cultures.?

Further, storytelling is also being used as an impactful tool widely to start compassionate discussions and connections to create a sense of relatedness. In the end, it's all about creating those micro moments of valuing your team.

Micro engagement is all about making an employee feel that they truly belong and matter to the organization.?Leaders can work toward creating micro-moments with their employees, whether it is in person or virtually to enhance employee experience, which in turn will have greater benefits like retention and better performance. Taking small steps, leaders can use effective methods like storytelling and spending meaningful time with their employees to ensure that employees can relate to the organization’s vision and goals.?

Sources

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/understanding-organizational-barriers-to-a-more-inclusive-workplace ?
2. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/micro-versus-macro-engagement-douglas-brown/
3. https://hrexecutive.com/how-micro-moments-can-support-belonging/