We’ve all been there — logging in to work feels like a drag. There is a looming lack of accomplishment, Sunday night blues, and a hunch that your career has stalled.
So what is Engagement? It’s emotional. If you feel enthusiastic about the work you do, if you’re proud of the problems you solve at work, if you believe in your employer’s ethos and values — then you’re an Engaged Employee! It’s how connected you feel to your team and your workplace.
As an Engineering Manager, one of the easiest ways to be great at your job is to make sure everyone on your team is healthily engaged.
Engaged employees bring an optimistic and positive can-do attitude to work, take pride in what they ship, and most importantly — they have fun at work! When the entire team is engaged, it tends to have a multiplier effect on all of the above.
And while there are probably dozens of management theory books written on Employee Engagement, I wanted to share a few quick ideas to measure and boost engagement on your teams over the next several posts.
Measuring Engagement
The easiest way to “measure” engagement is by observing behavior. Ideally, you want to watch people in a 1:1 setting as well as a broader team setting. You can get a strong signal about engagement for people you know well simply by listening to them and observing their body language. If you aren’t, try steering the conversation to deeper topics about their career, goals, and what areas they have seen themselves grow in the last few months.
Take every opportunity to measure and record your assessment of everyone’s engagement level. It may sound like a lot of work, but over time you’ll get good at paying attention to just the deltas — whenever what you observe doesn’t match what you previously observed. Note: if you’re finding this hard, try using a spreadsheet for the first month to score everyone 1-5 on their engagement and the date of observation — this doesn’t have to be very scientific, just an estimate.
When you notice a delta, acknowledge it! Maybe by joining them in their excitement — “Hey, I love that you’re so excited about this, tell me more!” or by offering to help — “Hey, I noticed you’re a little withdrawn today, is there something I can do to help?” Note: while the former could be in a public setting, the latter should be private.
You can get a lot of insight into people’s motivations and state of mind by interacting with them when you observe a change (either positive or negative) in their engagement level. This insight comes in handy when setting people up for success, supporting them in their careers, and building smooth-running teams.
If you support a team of up to 8 individuals, you are most likely in tune with everything on the team, including the social dynamics, workload, and morale. Using a qualitative, high-touch approach to understanding engagement is intuitive and fits in seamlessly with your schedule.
Scaling
If you support a larger team or a team of teams, you’ll most likely run into scaling challenges with a high-touch approach. At that point, you should lean on other leaders across your team to keep tabs on high-fidelity engagement so that you can shift your focus to measure lower-fidelity macro-level engagement across your organization.
In the next post, I’ll explore a few easy techniques that can scale and allow you to stay in tune with broader engagement themes across a large team.