Team engagement is the affinity for employees to have a mental and emotional attachment to their work or workplace. Simply put, how many people are there for more than just a pay check? When it comes to how engaged your employees are in their work, it is a huge factor for overall team performance. Here are 10 ideas for how to improve team engagement in a meaningful way.
What is employee engagement and why does it matter?
Employee engagement is the individuals’ commitment to their work, based on their overall satisfaction levels. This satisfaction level predicts how motivated they are to do their work and if they are likely to look for opportunities elsewhere.
Employee engagement is a hot topic, because disengaged employees can cost big money – and up to 26% of your employees can be disengaged. This negativity can spread to others like wildfire if you aren’t careful!
These disengaged employees can lead to excessive waste, increased time spent fixing work, budget overruns, decreased production due to missed deadlines, and defect increases.
High predictors of employee disengagement are employment uncertainty, anxiety, insecurity, and high stress.
Engagement studies have changed over the years. Employee engagement is now less about how happy an employee feels, but how fulfilled they feel with the work that they are doing
Team engagement is associated with work satisfaction for the team as a whole working together. How successful are your team collaborations? Are they functional or are people happier to work by themselves?
How do you measure current employee engagement?
You can probably feel when team engagement has slipped. It could be a gradual decline or a sudden one due to a major event at work.
But as we all know, to improve something, you have to measure it first.
Measuring team engagement is the essential first step for building a meaningful team engagement program. There are several different programs out there that I am not going to plug – research the one best for your organization. Your company may already have something in place.
Ensure that you measure before and after and share the results with your team. If they see that you are making a plan and following through with it – it already helps employees feel like they matter.
Ideas for how to improve team engagement as a leader
Here is a list of 10 meaningful ways to improve employee engagement one-on-one as a leader with your employees. When they feel motivated as individuals, they will be a stronger piece of the overall team engagement.
1. Leadership authenticity
This leader values building their team through their authenticity, which in turn buys leadership legitimacy, and builds followership. They have honest relationships with each member of the team and as a collective. This leader values everyone’s opinions. An authentic leader also has a high level of self-awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses.
Leverage this leadership style by using the honest relationships that you develop from your team to solicit their feedback and input. You can’t fix what you don’t know about!
2. Compassion as a cornerstone
A great leader by today’s standards is not the one who is economically driven, it is the people centered leader. When you seek to understand an employee’s perspective and really listen, you can understand what the employee needs from you.
With that knowledge, you can deliver exactly what will motivate the employee and keep them engaged in their work.
3. Feedback as an asset
Encourage feedback from your team in several different avenues. Make sure you are approachable with either an open door policy, or hours where you are accessible to the staff to just drop in. Have meetings where you actively solicit feedback, have official satisfaction surveys. Try out different avenues on your team to see what works!
As a note, I dislike anonymous feedback sources. It prevents me from asking follow up questions, and I have seen times where people use it as an avenue to be rude. But, it may need to occur on your team if you do not feel that feedback is occurring.
4. Meaningful performance reviews
I have found that performance reviews can be an amazing time to speak one-on-one with someone and ask them directly what they need from you.
Ensure that you focus on their personal goals and what they want to accomplish. If the employee feels heard and challenged, they will be more engaged.
Read more details on how to structure meaningful performance reviews and get some helpful tips on phrases for high performing employees, providing feedback on self assessment comments or conducting virtual performance reviews.
5. Make mentorship a normal way to conduct your leadership
If your team feels valued by your time investment in them and their success, they will be more engaged at work.
Millennials in particular feel a stronger sense of belonging to an organization when they feel that they are supported and there are potential growth opportunities for them. Mentorship is a great way to increase engagement and set up employees for future success.
6. Show gratitude
Saying, ‘Thank you’ is so simple, but very powerful. Tailor the gratitude even further by specifically thanking someone for what they did and what the impact was for the team.
Read more here on how to give an authentic compliment as a leader. Go ahead, be generous with your thanks for their hard work!
Ideas for how to improve team engagement together
Once you have your individual plans for feedback set up, work on group engagement with some of the following activities:
7. Flexible schedules
People have become accustomed to flexible schedules during the high conversion to work at home schedules. When employees come back to the office, ensure that they can have some flexibility on days off and start or finish times.
Don’t have flexibility in your start times? See if you can find a way to work with people’s preferred shifts or make it easier to trade.
8. Charity or volunteer work as a team
Build team bonding with meaningful events that can bring a team together. Millennials, which when you look around your team are a growing segment of your staff, value social responsibility and want to belong to companies that have values aligned with theirs.
This is a great way to have the team engaged in a meaningful cause. Support their efforts by ensuring that they have some dedicated time to plan any fundraising events – and support with your pocketbook as well!
9. Collaboration across teams
Ensure work silos are a thing of the past when different groups are brought together to work on projects.
Jump on any opportunities to have different departments brought together to work collaboratively.
Another great opportunity is to develop a mentorship program across different generations. Again, Millennials love to have value in their work, and peer mentorship is an amazing way to make some things interesting again for people close to retirement.
Read more on how to use generational similarities to lead in the workplace, there are more of them than you think!
10. Social events
Plan some social gatherings for your team to get to know each other!
This planning shouldn’t be all on you as the leader. Create a social events committee to create buy-in for the events. Virtual events can work too!
When it comes to ideas for how to improve team engagement, it all comes down to the right fit for your team. Some ideas may work right now, others may not. You may need a combination of things depending on what your staff engagement surveys report. Employee engagement is not a fast road, but it is an extremely important one. You can do it!
Share your employee engagement success stories below!