COVID19 disrupted the physical workplaces and transformed how people engage with the organization, with each other, with customers and with the work itself. Times like these are also an opportunity to rethink the practices organizations adopt to keep their people aligned and engaged.
Working from home will continue to be a standard feature of most engagement programs. Enabling people to working from home through systems, tools and processes will also be a focus area. Collaboration tools and technologies have already seen a sharp rise in adoption across the board. Compensation and career progression has always been at the center of engagement initiatives.
But are these and many other tactics that organizations adopt enough to keep people engaged?
While organizational interventions definitely help people feel good about the work environment, the real engagement largely depends on individuals, their intrinsic motivations and how they are led (or allowed to lead). Therefore, real engagement is a combination of an individual’s motivation, team performance, leadership and wide ranging organizational initiatives.
If you are a leader at any level in the organization, you are responsible for engaging your folks into the context of work by:
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Understanding the individual motivations
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Aligning work approaches to channel those motivations
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Provide people with opportunities to grow and learn
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Build the foundation of trust
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Ensure communication that aligns people to the purpose and context
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Have rituals for organizational, team and individual communications
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Share progress and outcomes
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Recognize people for their contributions
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Take decisions that underline commitment to collective good
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Be humble, human and respectful in all dealings with people
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Set right expectations to build a performance oriented culture in teams
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Help people learn through structured feedback and retrospectives
These and many more ways to engage people are based on a few foundational elements. In this context, I read an insightful post back in 2015 by Randy Conley at Blanchard Leaderchat where he outlined 4 basic needs for engagement.
Conley shares that intrinsically, people need an ecosystem of trust, a hope for a better future, a feeling underlining their sense of worth and competence.
While you can read the full article, here is a revised sketchnote summary of the original sketchnote I created in 2015.
The key questions to consider then are:
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While you are doing great on wider organization level initiatives, how are you empowering your managers to lead better remotely?
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How do you create a system of rituals, conversations, practices and tools that feed these intrinsic motivations of people?
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