How to increase employee engagement through team building

Описание: Corinne Walsh, Greg Nash, and Andrew Bartley of Platinum Leadership explore how team building and active learning can amplify employee engagement as organizations move from good to great.

How important is employee engagement to the bottom-line success of your organization? According to Gallup, it’s fundamental. They estimate organizations with high employee engagement are 147% more profitable than those with low engagement.

Gallup describes three categories of workers in the average organization. According to Gallup, the engaged 30% of employees are deeply committed to their organization and emotionally connected to its mission and goals. They routinely contribute their discretionary effort and go the extra mile. The disengaged 52% of workers are less emotionally connected to their employer. They show up but generally give the minimum required. And finally, 18% of employees are actively disengaged. They work against the organization, trying to undermine what their boss is trying to get done.

Mark Crowley translates these numbers in Fast Company magazine by saying, “Imagine a crew on a river where three people are rowing their hearts out, five are taking in the scenery, and two are trying to sink the boat.” If it were your company on the river, how many of your employees would be rowing their hearts out, taking in the scenery or trying to sink your boat?

For employee engagement to really take off, an organization needs to hire the right people for the right roles, set clear expectations, give people what they need to do their jobs effectively, and be generous with recognition and appreciation. When you’re doing all of this, the time is ripe for team building to take your employee’s engagement to the next level.

So with a nod to Simon Sinek, Why do we do team building? To help people experience the joy of working together. It’s too easy to lose sight of how magnificent the people we work with really are. Many of us spend more time with colleagues at work than our families at home. Familiarity can dull our perception of people’s gifts as we collect data to reinforce narrow assumptions and patterns of behaviour.

Groups of people get stuck in ruts too. We develop stagnant limiting beliefs about who we are and what we can accomplish together. Even teams with great track records on high plateaus can pick up momentum and set greater standards for themselves. When breakthrough performance is required, team building provides new perspective and energy. It reveals potential waiting to be tapped in the system as its people come to know and trust each other in new and surprising ways.

It’s as though the whole company changes channels. The experience creates new neural pathways in your organization’s operating system. This gives your team access to increased agility, creativity and intelligence as they come together.

So How does team building actually work? To be useful, team building has to meet the needs of the organization. A random selection of games and activities that worked in another setting does not provide a targeted response to effectively meet your organization’s needs. Team building must be carefully calibrated to complement your leadership, strategy, vision and culture. This requires a significant investment of time and resources, careful planning and skilled execution.

Here are four key ingredients we put into our secret sauce to increase employee engagement:
1) A ‘designed team alliance’
2) The Experiential Learning Cycle
3) Challenge by Choice
4) Systems Coaching

So there’s a bit on the Why and How of team building. What about the What, as in what activities can you actually run during your strategic planning, employee training or corporate retreat?

Team building can run from the mad to the ridiculous, and sometimes seemingly simple exercises are the most magical of all. You’ve seen scores of examples in the past few minutes. We like to say, ‘This isn’t rocket science. It’s harder than rocket science!' Every primer, activity and debrief is carefully pieced together to help people find and choose new ways to become part of a stronger team.

Through team building and active learning, you can invite people to open their eyes, take a little risk and experience their colleagues anew. There’s no end to the ideas you can implement to support this process. The discipline is to co-create a container within which it’s more likely for people to buy-in and work together.

When team building is part of a sustained commitment to increase alignment between an organization’s leadership, strategy, vision and culture, more people in more boats buy-in and decide to row – together.

For more information and resources: www.platinumleadership.com

Director of Photography: Stefan Sago, SAGOFILMS at
http://www.platinumleadership.com/our...
Produced by Platinum Leadership: www.platinumleadership.com