Are you a manager or team leader hoping to bolster employee engagement in your organization? Fostering greater employee engagement in your organization can improve your worker’s job attitudes , decrease worker attrition , and boost your organization’s performance. According to organizational scholars, employee engagement is a satisfying, beneficial attitude and approach to work. Organizational psychologists Michael P. Leiter and Arnold B. Bakker characterized employee engagement as a person's strong identification with their job, and high levels of vigor for, dedication to, and absorption in their work.
As I continue to examine the empirical literature on the subject, in conjunction with my experience with organizations, as an employee, a stakeholder, and an external passive observer, I recognize that there are many variables associated with efficacious performance stemming from employee engagement. Consequently, this process can be challenging; that said, by using the following strategies, not only will you accomplish your goals, but you may even surpass your expectations— concomitantly gleaning better performance from your teams while making for happier workers.
By concentrating on 5 vital work-team and organizational climate strategies, you will bolster employee engagement at your organization:
Each of these five strategic exercises will benefit three larger, interdependent, and complementary facets critical to the maintenance of a healthy and productive organizational climate and culture: Organizational Learning, Operational Agency, and Organizational Trust. By properly tending to these three factors via the five key work-team/climate strategies, you will buoy worker buy-in, happiness, commitment, and an array of other indices.
Psychological Safety
According to Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, psychological safety “is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” In an organizational climate of psychological safety, members of a work group feel secure openly expressing themselves and taking risks without fear of negative consequences, including criticism from coworkers or harm to their reputation. Investigations into work teams have revealed that when workers are confident that they can be open and vulnerable among their colleagues, the quality of the work-group dynamics are more productive, the interpersonal relationships are better, and these teams are more likely to be high performing.
Consequently, maintaining a psychologically safe work climate is vital to the success of change and quality improvement efforts , new product development processes , and organizational learning initiatives, including learning new technologies , as this is the ideal atmosphere for workers to hone newly acquired skills.
Team members who perceive their work climate as safe are:
Psychological Safety and Team Status Differentials
A crucial challenge that leaders must surmount in order to bolster psychological safety is team status differentials. Researchers have found that professional status exerts an effect on psychological safety. For instance, data from a field study indicates that physicians feel considerably more safety than RNs, who likewise experience greater safety than respiratory therapists and so on. However, this and other studies found that when team leaders are perceived as inclusive, welcoming, and responsive to others’ ideas and efforts, as well as open about their own mistakes, psychological safety is more uniform across the team. There is also evidence suggesting that strong team interdependence moderates the negative effects of status differentials. Organizational scholars believe that each member of an interdependent team has unique expertise and know-how needed to solve particular problems.
Consequently, each member, regardless of formal professional status, has opportunities to actively participate in knowledge sharing processes, which in turn, reduces differentials as reliance on each member’s knowledge and experience increases.
Remember, team leaders can moderate disparities between higher and lower status workers, resulting in greater psychological safety and improved worker engagement, social support, workplace commitment, and team performance. These are critical components to your success. Notably, these factors are strongly associated with high worker satisfaction and strong brand equity.
Autonomy & Accountability
High levels of worker discretion and autonomy in meeting role expectations often characterize work environments conducive to employee creativity and innovation. Worker engagement is maximized when workers are allocated the greatest degree of power possible for decisions they are responsible for fulfilling. Therefore, management must encourage teams to take risks, provide them with social support, and be trusting. This will bolster workers’ feelings of security, as they take on the risks, responsibilities, and accountability associated with operative agency. Additionally, make sure that each worker clearly understands their role and what is expected from them, by both their managers and co-workers.
Making & Managing Goals
It is well established that work performance is influenced to a high degree by goals. The largest positive effects on workers’ performance stem from setting well defined, challenging, and difficult goals that identify distinct outcomes to be achieved by workers’. Defining these goals is often the work of management, shaping the ways employees allocate their time and energy among tasks. However, team goal development is essential, as participatory goal setting leads to stronger goal commitment.
That said, teams must take the time to define their objectives, which can even be applied to team building events, including resolving conflicts, increasing morale, managing organizational change, enhancing productivity, developing skills, and improving team communication.
Goal setting should be done in conjunction with regular appraisal of progress towards goals, and constructive feedback, which increases self-esteem and improves performance. Without feedback, the positive results of goal setting are minor. Finally, feedback via a team dialogue is highly conducive to performance improvements towards goals.
Assessments
The practice of providing effective assessments and evaluations is centered on compiling, and using good evidence (even at the small team level) as tools for accurately ascertaining workplace facts and engaging in mindful decision-making. Each team should set their own assessment agenda, and be expected to develop assessments of:
Feedback must be a part of your team’s routine and has to be substantive:
Remember, feedback is at least half of the assessment process, and a vital tool for building a proactive, committed and engaged workforce. Research on organizational resources has repeatedly demonstrated that feedback is an asset that benefits employees’ ability to learn and engage their work processes , particularly due to decreased levels of role ambiguity, a situational factor shown to be very detrimental to performance outcomes as it can lead to workers experiencing a sense of disempowerment. Impact assessments are also an integral part of organizational change efforts, as assessing the outcomes of team decisions improves organizational learning and worker performance.
Social Support Structures
Social support means positive social interaction, including teammates helping one another, as well as other staff members. Social support is regarded as a means of nurturing positive team behavior that encourages communication, buffers against stress, and facilitates wellbeing. The importance of social support extends to organizational leaders too, as low work productivity and worker disengagement are both related to employees experiencing low levels of support from coworkers and management. Social support from supervisors is a well-documented antecedent to workers’ successful transfer and translation of newly learned information.
While understanding engagement in the workplace from an academic perspective is quite complex, do not let that discourage you from your goal. The above are well-tested and trustworthy area specific strategies that will boost the engagement of your workforce, and ultimately the performance of your firm.