How to get your team engaged and motivated about their work

If you’re like most people, you use January as a time to reset – a time to think about the successes and challenges of the previous year, and to make resolutions for becoming a better version of yourself over the coming year.  Common personal resolutions include eating less, quitting smoking, exercising more, and becoming more financially stable. Beyond these personal resolutions, the New Year is also a fantastic time to set professional (work based) resolutions. If you’re a leader, there is one resolution that should be at the top of your list – getting team members excited about (i.e., engaged with) their work. High team engagement is the holy grail of workplace leadership, with high levels of employee engagement shown to be good for business (e.g., increased profits, more satisfied customers, lower unwanted staff turnover), and for staff (i.e., higher levels of wellbeing).

Creating an Engaging Workplace

The best resolutions are those that are specific, clear goals are more likely to be achieved than vague goals. Drilling down to define your goal around team member engagement it’s helpful to remember that engagement is a two-way process. Because of this you only have control over some pieces of the puzzle. You can’t make someone suddenly become engaged, but you can create conditions within the workplace that are more likely to lead to higher levels of engagement. We can do this by zeroing in on the Motivational trifecta of Control, Growth, and Meaning.

 The Motivational Trifecta Up Close

• Control – Team members who have high levels of control within the workplace are given flexibility (within reason) about how they do their work and, are highly involvement in the inevitable change that happens at work.
• Growth – Workplaces where team members are allowed to grow provide a safe place to fail, the opportunity to specialise, as well as the opportunity to branch out through up-skilling.
• Meaning – Team members who have meaningful work can see how their own values are congruent with those of the business, and how their work contributes to the overall mission and work of the team.

Keeping your Resolution

Many people find that resolutions are easy to make but difficult to keep, and leaders are no different. Just like those who strive for weight loss or to give up smoking, it can be difficult for well intentioned leaders to keep to their new years resolution of creating a highly engaging workplace once the the stresses and day-to-day busyness amp up as the year progress.

To avoid falling back into old bad habits where team members get micro managed (non-exsistant control), the emphasis on good enough prevails (little opportunity to grow), and the core reason that the business exists and how team member’s roles contribute gets lost (decreasing meaning) there are three strategies that you can employ:

• Seek Accountability – Once you have defined your team engagement goal, let others know about it and ask them to help ensure that it remains a top priority. There is a good reason that health trackers and fitness apps integrate social-sharing of goals.
• Track Progress – Just as you would measure weight over time to track weight loss progress you can and should measure employee engagement. Weekly pulse surveys, annual culture inventories, and informal group check-ins are just a few of the options that will help keep your resolution on track.
• Let go of Black & White Thinking – We often abandon resolutions because the change is slower than expected, or the results aren’t quite as “perfect” as we had hoped for. This is caused by Black and White (or all or nothing) thinking, where anything less than perfection is considered a failure. If you become prone to this type of thinking, it’s time to remind yourself that slow progress is better than no progress, and even slight improvements in team member engagement are worth the effort because they offer a platform and lessons for further improvements in the future.

HR Business Direction can assist you to get your team excited about their work in 2016. Contact us here.

Alistair Kerr MPsychOrg; PostGradDip Psych; BPsych
Organisational Development Strategist | Psychologist
alistair.kerr@hrbd.com.au
07 3890 2066
www.hrbd.com.au