Have you ever asked yourself whether your team are truly engaged in their work? Or if there is something more you could be doing as a leader to fuel this?

Before understanding how to build engaged teams, it’s important to understand how people feel when they are engaged at work. 

In this video, we dive into the factors that fuel employee engagement and how you can leverage these to build high-performance teams. 

As you will have seen, there are three indicators that someone feels engaged: 

1: Autonomy

They feel responsible for the role, the projects and the initiatives they are working on. 

2: Competence

They come into work with the confidence that they can do what they need to do each day and achieve what’s expected of them. 

3: Connection

They feel that what they’re doing is greater than the individual tasks they do each day. They realise the work that they do on any given day is contributing to the collective success of the business.

Employees who feel autonomous, competent and connected will be far more highly engaged in their work, than those who don’t. 

So the next question we need to ask is: What is that we should be doing as leaders to create these feelings for them?

Three Key Things to Build Engaged Teams

1: Empowerment 

Empowerment creates ownership. 

To a large degree, empowerment is about trust. Do you trust your employees to get on with what they are doing? Or are you constantly checking in, undermining or micromanaging them?

Employees who feel empowered will take a greater sense of ownership of their work, think for themselves and ultimately achieve better results than those who are simply going through the motions to please a manager. 

2: Involvement 

Involvement builds a sense of competence. 

Think about a time when someone more senior than you asked for your opinion. How did you feel? Most likely you felt valued, and proud that they cared about what you had to say on the matter. 

Involving your team in solving problems, getting feedback, improving results and generating new ideas will build their sense of competence and in turn, their level of engagement. 

3: Inclusion

Inclusion creates contribution. 

When we talk about creating an ‘inclusive’ environment, we are not just talking about being welcoming of everyone within the workplace–we want to go deeper than that. 

This level of inclusion involves constantly communicating to your team: sharing when things are going well, sharing when things are not going so well and ultimately ensuring that they feel as if they are contributing to something bigger than just themselves. 

Together these three sources of engagement will enable you to build an unstoppable team. 

An engaged team is the biggest weapon in any company’s arsenal and it’s essential that we as leaders are constantly reflecting on how we continue to engage our teams–both for their sake and the sake of the business.