Engagement is important.
Engagement matters both to organisations and their employees. We know that when employees are not engaged organisation’s suffer.
Many larger organisations focus on the connection between an organisation’s culture and employee engagement. In their recent book Nine Lies about Work the authors found that the culture played a larger role when looking which company to join but much less once employees starting working there. The day to day values and beliefs were different then the cultural message many organisations used.
…while people might care which company they join, they don’t care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on.
How people experience working on teams are the single most important metric for employee engagement.
Research from ADP Research (download) in 2018 of 1000 full-time employees in 19 different countries clearly indicates that employer engagement is determined by experiences someone has on a team level.
Being on a team increases Engagement.
Workers who say they are on a team are 2.3 times more likely to be fully engaged than those who are not. This finding holds true within all countries in the study, and in many countries the disparity between non-team and team workers is even greater.
Organizations do not understand or act on the vital power of teams.
The challenge for almost all organizations today is that they are not set up to know very much about their teams. Most current HR systems are extensions of financial systems and only show their reporting structure via an organizational chart. Yet, most work happens in functional teams that can be fluid, depending on the project.
When organizations make great teams their primary focus — including what creates them and what can fracture them — we expect to see more significant rises in engagement.
Trust in team leaders is the foundation of Engagement.
When we examined the most engaged teams, we found that by far the best explainer of level of Engagement was whether or not the team members trust their team leader.
A worker is 12 times more likely to be fully engaged if he or she trusts the team leader.
12 times.
Knowing what is expected and using their strengths make team members engaged.
Two Engagement Pulse statements in the survey showed the strongest relationships to a worker’s feeling of trust in his or her team leader:
At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.
I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.
When I work with team members I try to focus my questions on these two areas.
Sometimes people are not aware of their strengths and have a difficult time seeing what these are. I focus on success in their past and what that meant to them and what characteristics they contributed to this success. Like the ‘peeling of an onion’ you eventually get to the core strengths and can begin to work with that.
When a leader can help team members feel clarity about expectations and communicate to them that their strengths are recognized and appreciated, these actions build trust, and a fully engaged team becomes more likely.
So team leaders, engaged team members expect a few things from you:
Make us feel part of something bigger, that you show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful.
Make us feel that you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals.
Create a sense of universality—all of us together—and at the same time to recognize our own uniqueness; to magnify what we all share, and to lift up what is special about each of us.
When you come to excel as a leader of a team it will be because you’ve successfully integrated these two quite distinct human needs - understanding expectations and use of individual strengths.