Team engagement

How engaged are your people?

Do you have an organisation where people love coming to work and where they take ownership for the results achieved. It’s important to ask these questions and to consider that if your people are not engaged your business results will be average if not poor.

RESEARCH: Many consulting organisations across the world measure and benchmark engagement. Dale Carnegie and MSU recently reviewed 1500 employees to try and understand engagement. They found that:

• 29% … of the workforce are engaged
• 26% … are actively disengaged
• 45% … are not engaged!

To better understand the concept of “employee engagement” let’s consider what it actually means.

“Employee Engagement” is when people are committed in heart and mind to their organisation, they are purposeful. They take ownership of their success, their impact on their team, deliverables, customers and results. How would your organisation be more effective if you could shift engagement? To understand if you have a challenge review our quick “engagement test”.

Can you answer yes to the following questions?

• My people take a lot of time off on “sick leave”
• There is constant gossiping and miscommunication
• The team work as individual contributors and often waste time and resources
• There is lack of ownership on their work activities that impact business success
• Leaders fight each other vs play in the leadership team
• The values are on paper only and not lived everyday
• Team don’t understand the strategy and don’t know how they contribute
• People feel there is a lack of TRUST both in the team and from leadership
• There are frustrations and “flare-ups” between people
• The organisation doesn’t achieve its goals and strategies

Short Term Objective: Engage the hearts and minds of your people to feel purposeful and connected to the team and the business.

1. Set the Scene: Kick-off / Offsite/ Cycle Meeting
2. Annual Conference
3. Team Alignment Session

1 Set the Scene: Kick-off / Offsite/ Cycle Meeting

Take your team away for a day and as a leader spend time with them on what your Vision, Strategy and Purpose looks like. Then allow your people to consider their role in the bigger picture and what it means to them. Allow people to robustly engage on how they see the strategy being realised and the challenges and obstacles they could highlight along the way.
Build commitments, measures and milestones along the strategy timeline. Remember, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and when we measure our progress and take ownership of our input results happen!

• How can you plan a great day?
• Engage in a fun / team activity that allows your messages and strategy to come alive
• Challenge thinking and get ideas
• Get the team on their feet, taking part in the planning process
• Don’t take over (talk all the time) but facilitate effective group discussions
• If in doubt get help! These sessions are so important and sometimes you need to be part of it to make it work

Activities that might help bring your session to life?

In our experience we use TED Talks, interactive discussions, “Chart and Plan” for measurement and review and finally for a kick-off we would recommend consideration of our Everest simulation. This simulation is fun way to challenge how to bring a strategy to life, the roles people play, the challenges (they could face), measurement, engagement, managing resources and aligning as a team to drive results. (For a visual overview of how this comes to life visit our YouTube Channel).

2. Annual Conference

Small (10-100) or large conferences (100-500) – Challenge thinking, link conference themes and create a WOW experience

Always start by creating a theme that aligns to your strategic message, this will help create impact. This theme needs to weave messages, insights, rewards and focus into a memorable team session, one that creates WOW.

• Make sure your conference theme is captured in all your activities.
• Get your people excited and engaged by how the theme links to the strategy and their ability to be successful in the next 12 months
• Create fun and learning in order to balance the investment and return
• Avoid “death by powerpoint” sessions, rather use the formula: present, engage, apply – Get your people involved and committed
• Ensure you have a team who are able to organise with creativity
• Make it memorable and capture memories for your team, use these as reminders throughout the year on their commitments,actions and success

3. Team Alignment

Need Team Alignment? Facing Team Conflict?

Conflict and alignment in teams is critical to resolve. Helping your team understand their impact, how to work together and achieve bigger picture goals and results is critical. Helping them understand each other allows for greater level of empathy and engagement. Short term and long term solutions can create insight, action and behaviour and team culture change. These programs can range from one event or team build into a 12-month program, it depends on what results you need and the level of misalignment and challenge.

Check the following:

• My people don’t understand the value of working together, there is conflict and they don’t realise the impact it has on people, culture, customers and business results!

Solution suggestion: Create an environment where they can understand their conflict and realise the impact it creates on the bigger picture.
Why not let them take part in a simulated activity called: Cold War! This activity will highlight the value of teaming and the impact it has on the bigger picture. Your team will then be able to consider their strategies for teaming and create and commit to solutions that will make a difference!

• The team don’t understand each other, their behaviours and motivators. This causes a lack of communication and drives frustration and disengagement.

Solution suggestion: Understanding behaviours, impacts and preferences is critical for team connection, communication and alignment. If done well your team can be equipped with a better understanding of themselves, how they work under pressure, what is important to them and then how others in their team operate. When this happens and teams and leaders engage the knowledge and day to day business success is an easy result.

Use a behaviour profiling tool to support your team’s success. The more sophisticated and researched tools are a bigger financial investment but the return is so much greater as it integrates into learning, KPI’s, development plans, team engagement and even recruitment strategies.We use the TTI Talent Insights Tool. (DISC and Workplace Motivators). It measures Behaviours and Motivators and support hundreds of individuals each year to own their behaviours and be a more effective team and business contributor.

Conclusion:

Engaging team alignment is far greater than the three areas we have outlined above. It is also based on leadership engagement, culture and the right person in the right role. It could also be challenged by ineffective measures, role clarification etc.

This overview is there to support your shorter focused engagement programs that can achieve a lift in people and performance. It is important to note that long term change comes through coaching, leadership engagement and cultural change.