10 General Rules + 4 Tips to Keep Your Team Engaged

Keep Your Team Engaged
Our organizational culture assessment data tells us that engaged teams advocate for their companies, outperform their disengaged peers, and intend to stay for the long term.   Based upon surveying over half a million employees across more than 5,000 organizations every year, our engagement research shows that engaged workers are over 40% more productive and effective than their disengaged counterparts.

We believe that a company’s engagement index is the equivalent of your company’s stock price for your organizational health.  Done right, employee engagement is the cumulative result of strong people strategies, structures, systems, and processes that produce discretionary effort and loyalty.

10 General Rules on How to Keep Your Team Engaged
Disengaged employees can bring team performance to a grinding halt.  While the process of engaging employees differs from company to company and team to team, there are some general “rules” that all leaders and new managers should pay attention to.  The degree to which employees are engaged depends on their perception of:

1. Alignment With Goals
   How well employees understand and agree with the organization’s and team’s strategic direction and the extent to which they understand how they and their teammates directly contribute toward overall success.
2. Individual Contribution
   Their willingness to exert discretionary effort toward their work.
3. Team’s Effectiveness
   How well the company gets the right people on the right teams in the right roles to be successful personally and professionally.
4. Retention Expectation
   Their intent to stay and perceived opportunities for personal and professional growth.
5. Trust of Coworkers
   The level of trust, relationships, and closeness within teams and between peers.
6. Manager Effectiveness
   How well managers perform their jobs and how much their employees respect their experience, behaviors, and performance.
7. Trust in Senior Leaders
   The employee’s perception of senior leaders’ capability and commitment to ensure that the company will be successful in the future.
8. Feeling Valued
   The organization’s commitment to its people in terms of development opportunities, fair compensation, and making the company a great place to work.
9. Job Satisfaction
   The intrinsic value an employee finds in their role.
10. Benefits
    The degree to which employees believe that the benefits offered meet their needs.

Tips Especially Helpful for the High Tech Sector
Though there are common engagement trends across all companies and industries, here are some tips on how to enhance employee engagement on teams responsible for innovation and cutting edge technology:

• Encourage Questions and Risk-Taking
  Create a safe environment where everyone is encouraged to provide feedback, share perspectives, and contribute their ideas and talents.
• Ensure High Quality Work
  Provide whatever training is needed to keep individual contributions at the highest level of quality so other team members can depend on each other. And give team members freedom to develop their own ideas apart from their regular tasks.
• Staff Teams that Will Work Well Together
  Beyond providing the structure and clarity needed for employees to understand expectations for a job well done, assemble teams of individuals whose strengths and styles complement each other.
• Establish Purpose
  Make sure each team member understands the purpose of their team’s goals within the larger context of what the organization is trying to achieve and how that contributes to society at large.

The Bottom Line
When you can create strong teams, you optimize your chances of business success.  Strong teams optimize talent.  Engaged employees enable strong teams.

To learn more tips to keep your team engaged, download The Top 10 Most Powerful Ways to Boost Employee Engagement