How to improve your team engagement (guide + template)

Daria Dzekunova -

People want to be involved in their work, enthusiastic about the organization they work for, and committed to their work fellows. As far as it gets along with the business’ interests, increasing team engagement becomes more than just “a nice thing to think about later.” Let’s dive deeper and see how your team can solve it.

What does engagement really mean?

Investopedia describes employee engagement as the level of enthusiasm and dedication a worker feels toward their job. Engaged employees care about their work and the company’s performance and feel that their efforts make a difference. However, at Chpokify, we believe that engagement is when a person not only cares but also acts. The organization, in turn, should put all the needed efforts into creating the conditions in which employees are able to turn intentions into movements.

How important is team engagement?

Employee engagement affects key business outcomes. When a team is engaged, it’s more likely to invest in the work it does, which leads to:

  • long-term employee retention, which leads to...
  • higher levels of productivity, which leads to...
  • a higher quality of produced work, which leads to...
  • more revenue, which leads to… You’ve got it :)

According to Gallup researches, engaged teams (with the engagement rate above the median) outperform disengaged teams on customer ratings (10%), profitability (22%), and productivity (17%). Highly engaged teams also show 24% to 59% less turnover, 28% less shrinkage, 70% fewer safety incidents, and 41% less absenteeism.

How to enhance engagement within the team?

Emotional engagement is not always enough. Besides being authentically caring, every team member should understand how to perform in a particular environment to achieve the team goals successfully. And this is where organization comes into play.
With these points in mind, we define three important steps to follow while building a team where engagement is an acknowledged common good:

Step 1. Measure

Measurement is the first step to take before implementing meaningful actions to improve engagement.

Think about if you and your team members can state the following:

  • I know my team’s goal and my individual tasks
  • I see how my actions affect the results
  • I am sincerely willing to contribute
  • I clearly understand how to contribute

Checking if your answers align with the statements would be a nice start. However, if you’d like to get a more detailed result, some deeper analysis would be needed. Here’s a copy of survey we use to measure engagement. It actually may work as a roadmap as well!

Note: If you are going to tie engagement efforts to business outcomes, don’t forget to measure ones. Indicators will likely look different for every business, but generally and as determiners of a company's health and its growth potential, it may be EPS, profitability, productivity, and customer ratings.

Once you manage to keep up with consciously and regularly measurements, your team gains a competitive advantage to keep the progress moving forward.

Step 2. Set clear goals

Engagement happens when every team member pursues the team’s goals (both long- and short-term ones) in their day-to-day interaction, with the company’s mission in mind. It is, in turn, possible when goals are always timely communicated and the mission, alongside values, is clearly defined and thoughtfully developed.

We understand that such an individual thing as developing mission and values can’t be implemented in a snap of a finger. Still, we do know a lot about setting tasks efficiently.

First thing first, communication is key to ensure everyone is aligned and understands what goals are being set and why. While planning, it’s crucial to:

  • Set realistic goals;
  • Assess each task from different members' points of view;
  • Have an open discussion.

And there is a number of methods and tools to get planning right. For example, poker planning is a great ready-to-go solution that naturally increases engagement. Also, it's just fun!

Step 3. Create proper environment

Employee engagement is based on trust, two-way commitment, and communication between an organization and its members. At Chpofiky, we believe the foundation of a good workplace is to establish trust between people. If each teammate's work is significant, people will do their best. People want to be trusted, heard, recognized, and that’s completely fine. Moreover, if those needs are met, the whole team benefits from higher engagement and productivity. And this is what we are aiming for, isn’t it?

Wrapping up

While increasing engagement may seem a complex task (and it is so), setting it as a priority is likely to benefit your team and the organization. As each team is different, you may try various approaches until you find one that works best. Don’t be afraid to explore!
You are welcome to discuss the topic with the Chpokify team in our Community Hub on Telegram. There, you also can:

  • Share your thoughts, questions, and feedback about our online poker planning tool
  • Suggest features and discuss them with the dev team
  • Be first to learn what’s new