Improving Employee Engagement to Accelerate High Performing Team
Employee engagement as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace. Employee engagement was first popularized by Gallup Consultant in 2004.
Why is Employee Engagement Important?
Based on Gallup data, engaged employees produce better business outcomes than other employees — across industry, company size and nationality, and in good economic times and bad.
But only 15% of employees worldwide and 35% in the U.S. fall in the “engaged” category.
Happy Employee ≠ Engaged Employee
Okay, let’s take a look at the Google case. Who doesn’t know that Google has an office with a top interior design and prioritizes the comfort of their employees? They also provide many other benefits, such as free lunch and massage service in their office.
Given such good facilities, wouldn’t everyone be happy? But, there’s no guarantee that it will be enough to make their employees feel engaged.
Therefore, Google implemented a strategy by giving their employees 20%-of-working-hours free time to do their projects. Employees can do some research and find the solutions needed. And from here, the seeds of their services were formed, including AdSense, Gmail, and Google Maps.
Feeling involved will Help to Increase The Level of Team Engagement
However many things can be done to increase the level of team engagement, one of them is feeling Involved. First, let’s imagine that we’re in the Product Development team. There are two (2) cases that I will try to bring up here.
- Initiatives, requirements, and solutions, are minimal in involving the team. The passive team will wait to execute the task given to them. It’s not surprising that jokes often appear, “we’re waiting for the task that fell from the sky”.
- Referring to employee engagement model by Holbeche, L.S. & Matthews, G.P in a quadrant voice, feeling involved will help to increase the level of team engagement.
In the second case, we should realize the importance of culture building with team involvement. Especially for complex and uncertain situations. It’s not easy, and it will be harder for a team with a micromanagement culture.
At the beginning, it can be very painful, especially for a newly formed team who doesn’t know how to understand the context of the business process. They will stammer in providing solutions, and maybe they had never imagined this before. So in the end, Leader will come up with a proposed solution.
Believe it’s not a big deal. Because it’s a part of the learning process.
Leader or manager can start by building the team’s curiosity by asking and involving the team. It will increase their motivation to do exploration. Hopefully in the next session, they can contribute more and be actively involved in providing ideas or solutions.
In the term of a growing team, Leader must be more restrained from not directly providing the solution to the problems that occur in the team, even though he already knows the solution. If the situation allows, he should seek solutions to emerge from the discussion process with the team first.
Please note, it’s only applicable if it’s possible. Not rigid style.
The goal is to get the team to be brave enough to share their ideas, bottom-up concept. It will make them more committed because they feel involved in the solution idea and increase the level of team engagement.
Of course we know that sometimes top-down decisions are needed, as explained before, it’s important for a Leader to encourage more team involvement in the decision-making process. It’s what we call, the art of leadership style.
Once again, no rigid approach. It all depends on the context at hand at that time.
If we looked back to Principles of Agile Development #11, skilled and motivated team members who have decision-making power, take ownership, communicate regularly with other team members, and share ideas that deliver quality products. This active contribution and involvement will lead to the growth of the team’s level of confidence in formulating solutions. We can expect the result, a high performing team.
