Introduction
In the recent months, since the development of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations have been challenged in every way on how to go about running their business. The need for distancing and working from home is another element that greatly impacted communication and the way work is done. Many organisations have realized quickly that they need to ensure people engagement in their organisations continue to be effective and impactful.
Effective Engagement - The Impact
So why is Engagement of staff so important and essential? During normal times, there is already a strong emphasis and need for staff Engagement to ensure a high level of productivity and competitiveness. Most Human Resources functions and Leaders intuitively grasp the urgency of the need. The challenge is how to help leaders understand the scope and impact of effective engagement. In the Covid months, we have had increased requests to facilitate Engagement webinars with the emphasis on how to enable leaders to be more effective when adopting the Virtual approach of engagement.
Normal times, the challenge is about not having enough time to “engage”due to busyness. Now with Covid there is the added difficulty of not being able to have face-to-face interactions and with immediacy.
Now before, we rush into the “doing” of engagement, it is worthwhile to reflect on why is employee engagement so crucial to the running of an organisation . It is with this in mind, that we are writing this blog to share what we believe are some important areas in organisations that effective engagement will have significant impact on.
They are as follows:
Leading and Effecting Change
Effective Engagement with staff is critical when an organisation or team is going through a phase of change. One of the issues that leaders implementing change will encounter would be “resistance”. This is a very broad topic and there are many causal reasons for resistance, but we will not unpack that in this blog.
What is important is that leaders in the process of preparing for change, have to convince their teams and help them understand the big picture and the rationale for change. They have to support their teams in the addressing of individual issues and motivate them to want to accept and implement the change
It is for this key reason that leaders will need to effect engagement to ensure that the change will yield positive results for all and that are personal concerns are addressed.
Creating a sense of Stability and Support
The business environment is always in a state of flux. Projects and interactions have to happen expeditiously and there is a constant need deal with unfamiliar situations. Now the role of leaders is made more challenging as they have to not only manage the change but now they have to do it under Covid situations.
With teams it is essential for leaders to be able to create a sense of stability to provide some sense of constancy so to be able to raise morale and motivation.
As we are just only a few months into the Covid pandemic, teams of individuals are dealing with challenge of avoiding infection, suddenly they have to work from home, and there is the daily barrage of pessimistic news. In addition to the above they have the added pressure keeping up work standards.
In this environment, it is inevitable that staff and teams will encounter various forms of concerns and stress. It is therefore important that leaders engage with their teams to provide for some level of constancy and balance to motivate and support their teams.
Walking the Talk (Organisation Culture)
All organisations have some form of a culture within which they operate in . Most organisations have it formalised, communicated and documented.
For most organisations, the culture practice or “walking the talk” is important. In such organisations the culture would invariably include the way staff and employees interaction and work together. In the "living” of culture values, Leadership behaviour and how they engage with their teams will therefore play a key part.
New staff will look to how leaders and team members engage in work and problem solving. Everyone would have expectations of leaders to encourage, coach and create the defined work climate and behaviour. All these are dependent on effective engagement.
This is all the more important during the Covid period as there will be “newbies” who have just been onboarded but are separated physically from their leaders and teams. Existing team members are looking to behaviour and actions of their leaders to manifest the culture values and to continue to practice them.
Productivity
Productivity is key to all organisations that want to stay competitive and viable. Again there are many management and organisation development concepts and interventions that focus on this topic. From Learning Organisations to High Performance teams, all these approaches require effective engagement to effect the required results. It is not only what team members have to know what to do, it is also highly depend on leaders to know how to engage and create the working environment and mind-set in the team to be a high performance team.
Summary (Next steps)
As we shared above, effective engagement have a multi-faceted impact on how individuals, teams, and organisations perform. It’s more than a process of how to; it is also a skill to know how and when to tweak the engagement approach to create the necessary impact in the different organisation context.
In this blog we attempted to share some key aspects of organisation functioning that engagement impacts and why if done well will bring benefits for the leader, the team and the organisations. The question that now begs to be answered is the How? It will be a longer discussion.
Comments