Business Guidance

How To Build A Successful Team Through Employee Engagement

28/07/09

By Alastair Digby

Great companies like Google and Amazon are at the top of their game because not only are they technically brilliant at what they do but they also have a unique company culture that recognizes that their team is paramount to their success. But what are the secrets of creating a unique atmosphere that truly engages your team so they work to their full potential? Where do you start and who is responsible?

We have all heard the maxim that your team is your strongest asset and going the extra mile to create a sense of true involvement from the managing director to the most junior member of staff will increase productivity and ultimately profits. Including the whole company in everything that goes on from being transparent about your accounts to choosing new members of the team breeds a culture of inclusiveness and commitment that can really help to drive a business forward.

The aim is to create a great place to work for all your team, not just the directors! This doesn't necessarily mean having a nice office with comfortable chairs, although that is definitely a part of it. The key is to create an environment where everyone feels valued and respected, where people learn and develop themselves and each other, where people are interested not just in their own roles but also in the wider picture of the company's growth and where they feel that their individual input can have a genuine influence on the development of the company and ultimately their own careers.

To get to this point means creating a sense of ownership and empowerment amongst the team. A lot of businesses still don't seem interested in involving all of their staff in the workings of the business outside of their own definable role. This could be because they don't think they would be interested, they wouldn't be able to add anything - what could someone in the finance department add to the sales or marketing process for example? or perhaps they simply believe that they have it all covered. They don't believe that getting people involved in that way would bring any benefit to the business and in fact it would probably just distract them from doing their own job properly.

There is however a strong argument that the opposite is true. The more you teach and coach your team about how your business works, how much money it makes, what makes it profitable, what challenges you face and what it all means to them personally, the more ownership and loyalty they will feel towards your company and the more motivated they will become to help out in whatever ways they can to make it a success. One of the best learning methods is peer to peer learning, no matter how senior you are in a company, you can always learn new things and ideas from others, even from the most junior people.

Most of us will have worked in a variety of roles in different organisations in the past and the chances are the more memorable roles were the ones where you felt integral to and valued by the company you worked for. Successfully recreate this in your own company with your entire team and you can imagine the positive effect this would have on productively, morale and performance. At the opposite end of this spectrum, if you fail to engage the very people who keep your company running, you are unlikely to engender much loyalty with your team which can lead to high rates of staff attrition - it's just a job and just another company.

So how can all of this have a direct impact on productivity and profits?

Firstly a happy team is a motivated and productive team. If people feel valued and feel that they can make a difference, they are going to enjoy being at work. This helps with reducing absenteeism and improves staff retention.

Retaining staff can be one of the biggest and costliest headaches for any company irrelevant of size and industry sector. In order to attract and then crucially to retain the best talent available you need to offer benefits and interest beyond just an exciting job spec, competitive salary and a healthcare scheme. For example having an honest and meaningful CSR or environmental policy, or serious involvement in community projects is increasingly important to large numbers of people and can help them engage with their company on a deeper level. The more your team can get involved with outside of their day to day duties, the more likely they are to enjoy working with you and the more loyal they will become. Lowering staff attrition keeps your recruitment and training costs down and it also means you will build up an invaluable pool of knowledge and learning within your team.

Secondly helping people to understand how a company's finances work and teaching them about concepts like profitability also means that things like individual and team targets are much more meaningful - if people understand why they have targets and why they are set at the levels that they are, they are much more likely to buy into the concept and work hard to achieve them.
If your team understands that profit will be reinvested back into the business, to make it stronger, to develop new products and services which could give them more opportunities to further their careers, more diversity in their roles and probably more money in their own pockets, then why wouldn't they try harder and be more motivated?

Coaching your team in how your business operates, what it needs to survive and thrive and what company success will mean to the individual and the team can make a big difference to the effort that people put in to achieve collective and individual goals. It encourages a sharing of responsibility and ownership and also stimulates creativity and new ideas. And which business doesn't want that?


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