How Engaged Is Your Team, Really?

A recent global study of engagement from the ADP Research Institute found that if employees consider themselves part of a team (or even better, part of more than one team), they are twice as likely to feel engaged in their work. Furthermore, countries with greater numbers of workers who consider themselves part of a team, such as India or Saudi Arabia, report high levels of engagement as well. Knowing that engagement is tied to teams is critical for leaders looking to increase their output, since engagement is a known driver of productivity. But research we conducted on behalf of Oracle and Engage for Success (a UK group seeking to improve engagement levels across workplaces) shows that many teams may be less engaged than they appear.

Over a three-year period, we interviewed team leaders, ran focus groups, observed meetings, and gathered engagement metrics across 41 work teams spanning nine industry sectors including transport, government, healthcare, utilities, chemicals, technology and non-profit. Our research — in this study and others — suggests that a third of teams fall into a category we call pseudo-engaged. These teams appear engaged both in surveys and in the eyes of management: The employees are often satisfied with their jobs, committed to the company, and happy to recommend the workplace to others. But when we looked more closely, we found that they also exhibited deeper signs of disengagement, such as antipathy toward colleagues and dishonesty to managers.

Why the disconnect? These teams are made up of people who may be highly engaged at an individual level — and eager to further their own careers — but just aren’t invested in their teams. Understanding what’s really going on can help managers and leadership get to the heart of seemingly intractable issues. Keep alert for these three signs:

Lack of teamwork

Consider a team of healthcare professionals we studied in a dementia care ward. They had excellent engagement scores and the team manager had recently won a leadership award. The nurses and staff reported that they were motivated by a strong sense of purpose rather than money or status. It was clear that they were committed to providing the best patient care — for their own patients, anyway.

Still, things weren’t perfect. For one, the nurses were burned out. One said that she was so physically and emotionally exhausted at the end of the workday she could not even muster a smile for her children. Some of the work wasn’t getting done: despite their tender care for their patients, these nurses had little regard for team-based duties, such as helping to prepare the ward for mealtimes. We also observed that they were reluctant to partner with each other — to change a patient’s bed linen, for example.

The ward’s management had been unaware of these problems because they had focused on the team’s successful top-line engagement numbers, none of which measured teamwork. To avoid this myopia and correct for its oversight, leaders should build metrics for team success and explicitly name team duties in individual job descriptions. They can encourage teamwork by explicitly celebrating acts both large and small: for example, spontaneously stepping in to help with a patient’s bed change, or creating an initiative to improve how relatives provide feedback. Team leaders can speak up when they notice these acts in the moment and again in team meetings so that everyone can see collaboration is recognized. Management can also encourage team members to give each other kudos through coworker appreciation programs, such as a wall where employees write simple thank-you messages to their colleagues when they feel supported.

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Source: https://hbr.org/2019/10/how-engaged-is-your-team-really