Tip #1 Proactive comms and openness
Kenny, Managing Director of HR advisory firm HR Dept said: “Businesses that proactively invest in team communications have happier, more engaged and productive teams. There are many aspects to a good people strategy but proactive communications is a crucial component. Openness and transparency builds trust and inclusion.” Felicity’s HR organisation has around 6,000 clients nationwide, so her observations are based on a decent sample size. But proactivity and openness can be difficult to achieve. Now more than ever. With only 8% of desk-based employees now required to attend the office every day, and with over half of desk-based employees working from home 5 days a week, internal communications face big challenges. Remote working is making comms tough. More of that in a bit.
Tip #2 Personal investment in the job
This is why the fundamentals are so key. The bedrock of employee engagement is having personal investment in your job. If someone doesn’t have personal investment in their job, the best comms in the world will be useless. Fall on deaf ears.Deloitte Consulting agrees. They did some useful research back in 2020 – still relevant today – and posited 3 key drivers of strong employee engagement;
- You must feel your contribution and strengths are valued
- You must feel your contribution is shaping meaningful business outcomes, fulfilling a vision ideally
- You must feel comfortable at work, fairly treated, respected – the core foundation of the employment contract
Deloitte’s research established that someone’s personal investment in their job is heavily linked to a sense of belonging, team connection and work outcomes.
Interestingly, even back then 79% of businesses recognised team connection was key to their success, but only 13% felt were they were creating the required environment.
Tip #3 Small teams work best
So how do you get that personal investment happening? In my experience, small, highly invested teams are where individuals feel most valued and empowered. Even if you’re a large business, it should be a priority to create this environment. It’s possible however big you are via project work or time-limited, goal-based initiatives. Feeling like an unloved cog in a machine, compounded by the isolation of remote working and top down comms is the pits If you’re not familiar with the two-pizza team concept, have a read of this Amazon article. Scroll halfway down for the pertinent bits. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has thought long and hard about this. And his thinking is backed up by other workplace studies.
These quotes expand on the small teams principle;
Smaller teams increase ownership and empowerment. This can mitigate the Ringelmann Effect: a tendency for individual productivity to decrease in larger groups. As team resources swell, there is less focus on individual effort as people lean more on others to shoulder the load. The magnitude of individual contribution decreases as team size grows. Inversely, individual effort increases as the team size decreases.
Smaller teams also increase employee satisfaction – a key concern as today’s organizations strive to attract and retain the best talent. A notable study by Hackman and Vidmar shows that individual satisfaction decreases as team size grows. Oftentimes in large teams, individual contributions are less recognizable, and individual ownership over specific areas becomes more diffuse.
Tip #4 Morning stand-ups
Agile is a cousin of the small teams idea and offers a multitude of management tools to help focus a team’s delivery, get stuff done. If you’re in the software world, you will have experienced the pros and cons of Agile. I’m not advocating Agile as a general solution for employee engagement. It’s an acquired taste, a religion for some, unworkable in many settings. However, I do recommend stealing a feature from its toolkit for everyday use.
The morning stand-ups.
I’ve participated in over a 1,000 morning stand-ups since March 2020 – the first COVID lockdown. That’s pretty much every working day. It’s been a sustainable regime. 9.15am, my immediate colleagues and I meet online. The timing is great. It’s at the front of the day to help kickstart your focus but its not too early – we all have time to do family stuff, the school run, walk the dog, hit the gym. The sessions are short, 10-15 mins. Enough time to connect, shoot the breeze, share and tweak our priorities together, discuss worries, concerns, blockers, feel supported. It’s engagement gold-dust. And good for productivity.
Tip #5 Get yourself a decent intranet
As I said at the top, achieving meaningful team connection is a challenge at the best of times. With remote working it’s tougher than ever. The issue isn’t the volume of colleague interactions. There are millions of colleague conversations going on across a plethora of digital platforms (Slack, Miro, Jira etc.) every second of every day – posts, comments, tagging, notes on systems. But it’s fragmented. The concern is ‘where’s the cultural centre-point for the business?’ Pre-COVID it was the office. But that’s not where people are nowadays.
The role of the intranet has become key.
Our research tells us that over 60% of businesses are now planning high to medium use of intranets, up 18% from pre-COVID times. [Brave New World report by Pancentric]
Modern-day intranets provide a definitive online home for the business, a place that’s recognisably yours and crystallises individuals’ sense of belonging and purpose as well as an gateway to the operational stuff. And that helps engagement. We call it ‘The Power Of Together’.
