In my last post, I went over why healthy engagement across your team is a cornerstone of productivity and how to get a sense of engagement levels on your team.
While you can lean on high-touch approaches like recurring 1:1s and sprint meetings to stay in tune with engagement across individuals on a single team, as your team grows into a larger organization, it becomes rather untenable to meet each person 1:1 on a bi-weekly cadence. And if you do, you’ll end up with less time to focus on other aspects of your role.
When you support a larger organization, you typically have other leaders helping you — making team engagement a topic for discussion at your recurring staff meeting is a great way to keep an eye on the ball. Leveraging the key influencers across your team to focus on engagement and empowering them to act on any downward pressure is the best way to keep the entire organization healthily engaged.
Measuring engagement across multiple teams
All that said, you should still keep a finger on the pulse with engagement levels across the organization you support. Still, you will generally have to make the trade-off of settling for lower resolution data. Here are a few easy tricks to get a pulse for larger teams and organizations —
Surveys
Sending a quick survey to ask for feedback on a recent all-hands or demo meeting can give you muted signal on who the least engaged and most engaged individuals are.
People who don’t respond are probably not as engaged, and people who take the time to fill in the free-form comments are probably very engaged. Note that I’m only referring to the survey response rate to get this signal — you will get additional signals via the actual questions in the survey.
Generally, this signal is muted because of survey fatigue, busy schedules, time-off, and other factors that introduce noise. I still like this method because it’s so easy to put into motion — and it’s all a game of trade-offs.
All Hands
Next time you schedule an All Hands or an AMA-style meeting for your organization, you can check the invite list with the actual attendees to see who didn’t show up. Unlike surveys, meetings require real-time participation and involve more moving parts like scheduling conflicts, looming deadlines, and the length of advance notice, amongst others. Still, looking at patterns can give you a muted signal on who is probably not engaged.
What about signal on people that are engaged? People that ask questions or seek clarifications in broader meetings are probably engaged (depending on the kind of questions). It’s also very likely that it’s the same people that usually ask questions at these meetings. You will also have personalities in your organization that shy away from asking questions in broader meetings but are otherwise healthily engaged. I don’t use the All Hands format to get any signal on who is engaged.
Round Tables
While you can’t make time for recurring 1:1s and you may not have the proper context to participate in sprint meetings, nothing is stopping you from setting up ad-hoc 1-hour group meetings with your own context and the goal of connecting with people with whom you may not interact with regularly and getting a chance to assess engagement while you’re at it.
Bagel breakfasts, “Round Table” lunches, happy hour tacos, cocktail soirees, or <whatever is consistent with your company’s culture> are a great way to connect with a specific cross-section of your team. You can get a strong, qualitative signal on each person’s engagement by asking them to tell you about their work, what they like, what challenges they’re facing, etc. You can organize these meetings split by teams, projects, work-streams, geographic locations, or levels. Capping the attendance to 6 or at most 8 participants encourages direct participation from everyone.
Scaling
While these approaches scale well for an organization of up to 50 people, you’ll encounter challenges beyond that number. You may still be able to use some of these tricks to organically assess the engagement of just the senior people across your team, but you’re probably better off using an off-the-shelf tool that gives you more insight across your entire team.
What’s Next
Next, I want to go deeper into some common themes that affect engagement — which is what next week’s post is about!