Reasons for high Employee Engagement Index
This year the company did their bi-annual Employee Survey powered by Gallup. As we did this 2 years ago, my team's results were among the lowest ranking. But this time the Employees Engagement Index went up significantly. I was rated very good by the people I lead concerning my leadership skills and they showed way higher engagement values than comparable teams. So what led to this improvement?
I took the low results very seriously. In the first workshop I had with the team they stated that most of the ratings are low due to volatile project goals, instabilities in the software we are testing, too short timelines, etc. So a lot of stuff you could put in the drawer „That’s life, not under my control.“ and forget about it. But I didn’t. I invested a lot of time in 1:1 talks, smaller workshops and did a lot of incremental changes to the processes, meeting culture, external marketing of the team’s successes.
As the new results came in and we improved across the board, I was very proud and happy about it. I couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks 🤣. I think at some point everyone was getting bored by me, but I didn’t care 😬.
After reflecting on the new results and talking to my team, I think the reasons boil down to these two important cultural pillars:
Take responsibility and give your team focus by making decisions when they need it. The worst thing you can do is to get afraid and try to sit it out. If you do that, the whole team will grind to a halt. We live in chaotic and volatile (business) times. People need clear direction and managers should be the people giving them what they need. Sometimes you can just say what has to be done in this week, so do that and be open about the low visibility. When the visibility gets better, then aim for longer time periods and loosen the „micromanagement“.
Be authentic and treat your people the way you would want to be treated. I do not believe in the nonsense of „separate your personal and work behaviors“, because I think you would need to be a psychopath to be able to pull that off convincingly. E.g. when you are sick, do you want your boss asking you to join meetings or call you during your sick days? No, you probably want some words of assurance that everything will be taken care of, that you should go offline and have some (chicken) soup. The same applies if you find out that your employee has a sick child, wife has family issues etc. Treat your team with respect and speak to them openly about the good things and the improvement points. Integrity is the magic word.