Getting The Wins Through Team Engagement

Give your employees the motivation to do their best work.

Does your current work environment support or stifle team engagement? This is a pretty important thing to know because if your team members aren’t emotionally invested in their work then you can wave goodbye to your financial investment in your company.

The root of employee engagement is motivation; intrinsic motivation to be exact. This is the type of motivation that happens when your team really cares about the work they’re doing and not simply about the $$$. On the other side of things, employees who are sitting counting down the hours till 5pm will be out the door a lot faster than their peers, with studies showing they’re 12 times more likely to leave in their first year. The same study revealed that a poor onboarding experience led to 40% of employees feeling disengaged within the first few months of joining a company. Think about that for a minute: almost half of your team may not be reaching their potential because your company processes aren’t good enough to instill that intrinsic motivation in them to do so. Simply put: they haven’t bought into your company emotionally. And it’s going to cost you, a lot.

Studies show that disengaged employees cost organizations around $450–550 billion each year.

The good news is, you can fix it. Your team is a unit. But it is also a collective of individual people with individual needs, commitments, and goals. To reach the individual, you have to reach out to the individual. But how do you do that in a company with 1000s of employees? First, you put the right people in place to manage your teams with the 1:1 communication, recognition, and support required to get that personal commitment back from them. And then, you put a process in place to make this even easier to do. One that works. And one process that has been proven to work across the sphere is Gamification. (want to learn more about how this works? Check out our post on “Gamification: Making Work Fun”)

“Research indicates that workers have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.” — Zig Ziglar

With Gamification processes in place in your business, you can set performance metrics for individuals to measure themselves against and connect with other users to encourage friendly competition. When Gamification is utilized within a project management platform, it increases visibility within the team and helps members to feel a “part” of what’s going on by having instant access to the bigger picture.

Think of it as a solo jog Vs relay race. The person jogging alone is thinking only about their next breath, their next step, the end of the road. However, the participant in the relay race has a whole team depending on them, they can see the possible final outcome and the importance of their role in achieving that. The person in the relay race is engaged in the process because they can see the part they play in it and their hard work is most definitely “seen” and appreciated. That is the kind of thing that gives the intrinsic motivational push needed to make team performance excel.

Reward Effort, Not Just Results

The efforts of your team should always be recognized, not just when they succeed. Because, let’s be real, you’re going to fail and sometimes you’re going to fail hard. But a strong team is one that can acknowledge the work that’s been done and utilize learnings from any failures to move forward towards success. Constructive criticism will help an engaged team to renew their motivation and try again. Ignoring or catastrophizing the failure, will not.

In our Gamification system in Buckets, users are rewarded with lots of fun perks each time they hit a milestone and other members are notified of their achievements. Completed your weekly quota of Checklists? BOOM: high five. Logged in every day for a week? BOOM: high five. They’re not metaphorical high fives, by the way, they are actual high fives (gotta keep it real!).

All of these little wins add up over the week and get added to your Dashboard where you can unlock secret treasures every time you hit a significant milestone. Yes, I know that sounds like a PS5 game, but it’s called Gamification for a reason!

Finally: Get The Wins

Latest research shows that highly engaged companies have 21% more profitability than their competitors. Once you have a Gamification and organized task management system in place, you can ensure you fall into that category.

Creating a system that involves everyone in the company creates increased engagement in the overall process, and it will be a lot easier to measure performance for both you and your team members. This is when you’ll start getting “the wins”. For your company and the individuals working hard to keep making it a success.

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