5 Ways to Boost Engagement at Work

5 Ways to Boost Engagement at Work One element the long-term success of any organization depends upon is employee engagement. A team invested in the work they do has a contagious energy that helps an organization build momentum. Boosting engagement also helps to boost employee satisfaction and retention, creating an upward spiral. Investing in your individual team members leads to benefits for the organization, which adds to the success and happiness of the team members, which adds to the organization’s success, and so on. Here are 5 ways to boost employee engagement on your team. 1. Recognize and Invest. Take a genuine, personal interest in the members of your team. What are their individual talents and goals? What do they do well? Recognize the value they bring to the team individually and to the group. When someone notices the hard work we’re doing, it helps to energize us to continue performing… tell them when you notice, and I will quote the famous book, The One Minute Manager, “catch them doing something right” on purpose! Additionally, invest in getting to know each member of the group. What excites them? How do they spend their free time? Cultivate respect for each person by getting to know them a little bit. 2. Solicit Feedback. What does the team think is going well? What obstacles make their work more challenging? Give your employees a chance to express concerns or issues and hear them out. Resist the urge to explain or defend. What action can you take to address the group's concerns? If something can’t be addressed in the way the team desires, be frank about that, too. Openness cultivates trust, another essential component of boosting employee engagement. 3. Communicate. Communicate. Communicate! Meet regularly to discuss what’s new, provide status updates, share success stories and talk about issues as they arise. This helps ensure that everyone stays focused on the same priorities, is informed of new information, and has an opportunity to ask questions or point out any challenges that have arisen. Communicate changes clearly and make sure your team gets the answers to the questions they have, even if it means you have to research answers first and respond later. Make sure you follow through with promises to provide further information. Failure to do so can make the team feel like their concerns are unimportant or that you’re unwilling to address concerns. Both can sap motivation. 4. Support Initiative. As the team builds working relationships with one another, you may notice certain members emerging as natural leaders. Make space for people to take on additional responsibilities or lead initiatives that make sense. This recognition and response to new ideas can foster a creative and positive work environment. This allows the group to run more effectively, boosting not just engagement but also outcomes. 5. Provide Professional Development Opportunities. Professional development is critical for any organization to stay ahead of shifting customer expectations and advancing technologies and solutions. Provide opportunities for your team members to earn [...]

By |2024-10-21T09:30:28-04:00October 21st, 2024|Leadership Tips|
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5 Critical Keys to Collaboration

5 Critical Keys to Collaboration Now more than ever, succeeding at work involves teamwork. The great news is that the right team generates results that far exceed what its individual members could achieve. An ineffective team, however, can slow down the group’s processes and innovation. Full team engagement comes from knowing their “why” and using their unique talents to contribute to the common goal. That’s why these 5 critical keys to collaboration are so important. These pillars of successful teamwork will help boost employees’ investment in the group and their confidence in their own work. They promote innovation and creative solutions that simplify workflow and improve performance. Read on to learn how these 5 keys to collaboration contribute to effective teams. 1. Time Management. Collaboration doesn’t always require a lot of face time. Once the team establishes clear goals and tasks, each member needs focused time to work on their tasks. Make sure that the ratio of time spent as a group to time spent individually working best suits the needs of the group and doesn’t distract from getting the work accomplished. Can you guess the most common complaint that we hear when we give our time-management session? Too many meetings! 2. Communication. Communication is a make-or-break component of any team project or collaboration. To boost successful communication, give some thought to how the team will communicate. How will members share issues or ask questions? Is this best done via chat? Emails? Holding questions until a set meeting time each day or week? Establish the preferred communication methods for each type of situation and evaluate whether this works for everyone after a few weeks. 3. Innovation. In the best collaborative teams, the sum far exceeds the abilities of the parts. How does this happen? One key to successful collaboration is to encourage innovation through brainstorming, engaging new ideas, and supporting out-of-the-box thinking. Even ideas that are not themselves feasible solutions can be useful because they tend to trigger other, potentially more useful ideas. Ensure that the group remains a safe place to brainstorm new ideas. 4. Celebrate Team Successes. As the team develops new ideas, builds useful tools, and adopts new processes, find ways to celebrate each of these successes. Call out team members whose ideas have solved problems or moved a project forward. Acknowledge those who went above and beyond to ensure that deadlines were met. Thank team members whose diligent work keeps the project on track. Celebrating these successes reminds the team of their power and effectiveness as a group and reminds each team member of their value to the group. 5. Collect Feedback. Ask your team for feedback on what practices best support their collaborative efforts and what can be improved. Having a say in how the team operates will boost its efficiency by allowing adjustments that directly aid its members, but it also generates deeper investment in the team. Build Your Own High-performing Team Join us for a training session that will show you how to [...]

By |2024-09-23T19:29:33-04:00September 23rd, 2024|Leadership Tips|
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Using Personality Profiles to Boost Growth

Using Personality Profiles to Boost Growth A personality profile is one of the most powerful tools to help you understand your strengths, preferences, and/or traits that come less comfortably or naturally to you and your team. These profiles can help you and your team members understand your natural talents, communication, and work styles, as well as identify blindspots and development opportunities for better collaboration. While this information mainly focuses on identifying and using our talents, it can also shed light on the source of misunderstandings, help pinpoint the team's unmet needs, and offer insight on leveraging growth opportunities. Here are some ways you can use personality profiles to optimize teamwork. 1. Helps Us Understand Individual Needs. A personality profile, such as the DISC profile, allows teammates to see how their values and traits impact how they relate to their role in the team. This might help explain why we have different approaches and expectations. For example, if one team member prefers using frank and direct communication and their colleague values tact, maintaining harmony, and using gentle words. Both approaches to feedback are valuable, and pairing these two teammates together to practice feedback may help them learn to give balanced feedback that's candid and gentle. 2. Celebrates Diversity. While it might sometimes feel tempting to build a team of people just like us, what we miss when we do that are the vast benefits of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that result from mixing things up and valuing perspectives different from our own. This is one of the reasons we should be careful if we offer a personality profile as part of an onboarding process or for a team-building session. These profiles aren't meant to judge or limit the abilities of team members. For example, it would be silly to route all new hires who are extroverts to a sales team, and all introverts to data entry positions. While personality profiles offer clues about a person's preferences and traits, they don't exhaustively define the person. Instead, they're a tool to help us understand how to work well together and identify growth opportunities. 3. Boosts Growth and Productivity for All. A personality profile can help you understand what environment and leadership style will allow you and your team members to be the most productive and happy. Would your team benefit from an open, collaborative workspace, or do they work best in a quiet setting with few interruptions? Understanding this can help you learn to balance the team's needs, which may mean alternating periods of quiet with collaborative meetings. Understanding your personality can also help you see the potential areas for growth and understand who might be a good mentor or "buddy" by sharing and using a strength you may not have. A very organized employee can offer strategies or tips to help you boost your organizational skills. A team member with strong tactfulness could serve as a sounding board, helping you refine your candid feedback to be tactful but direct. When we find [...]

By |2024-02-06T10:55:57-04:00February 6th, 2024|Leadership Tips|
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’Tis the Season for Employee Recognition and Appreciation

’Tis the Season for Employee Recognition and Appreciation As we near the year's end, we reflect on its many highs and lows. The year may have brought unexpected hardships and losses along with successes and victories to celebrate. As we process and reflect, it’s important to remember the team who navigated the ups and downs of life this year and share with them the meaningful ways they contributed to helping us maneuver around setbacks and achieve our goals this year and to take a few moments to offer employee recognition and appreciation. The fact is, in our post-pandemic world, a little encouragement can go a long way. Forbes recently published an article detailing how employee recognition elevates employee loyalty (which, incidentally, has a significant impact on creating customer loyalty and business growth). It also creates a sense of purpose and belonging—knowing our work matters makes us feel like an essential part of a team. Here are 4 tips for recognition to keep in mind. 1. Acknowledge Challenges This may have been a challenging year, from economic changes to staffing issues, but your team has navigated these waters together. It’s okay to acknowledge that there were rough patches and thank them for staying the course and leaning in to help the team reach the other side. No matter what your team faced this year, you met it together, and now you stand on the other side, looking back at the year together. Acknowledging that you asked team members to go above and beyond or saw them handle unexpected challenges shows that those contributions matter and serve an essential purpose. 2. Recognize Individual Contributions Take some time (put it on your calendar if need be) to think over your team’s performance this past year. Are there instances when a team member’s new idea increased efficacy or workflow? Who went above and beyond when deadlines loomed? Is there someone who stepped up when challenges arose? Offering team members a Christmas bonus or raise is a wonderful way to show appreciation, but if you don’t have the resources to do this, offering employee recognition and appreciation is another powerful way to let your team know you appreciate them. You might write and hand out individual holiday cards or make a point to speak to your team, sharing with them examples of how their contribution to the team positively impacted the company and met a need you had. Make sure your feedback is specific and inclusive. 3. Celebrate Successes Take advantage of the holiday season to create a celebration of your own. Take time to celebrate your team’s successes this year. This doesn’t have to be a huge event, just something celebratory and above the ordinary. It can be as simple as calling a team meeting and providing donuts and coffee for everyone. At the same time, you take the opportunity to recap the team’s high notes and successes or as fancy as a catered lunch or party at a lovely venue. Any of these [...]

By |2024-01-08T10:46:32-04:00December 18th, 2023|Leadership Tips|
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4 Ways to Create a Collaborative Team Culture

4 Ways to Create a Collaborative Team Culture Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” It’s one of the best serendipitous qualities of a collaborative group. What began as an ordinary or half-impossible idea can round a brainstorming circle and become a genius solution in the hands of a collaborative team. Creating a collaborative team may take a little effort, but the rewards the team receives are more than worth the investment. Here are 4 ways to create a collaborative team culture. 1. Encourage Open-mindedness and Respect The first rule of creating a collaborative team is that the team must be a safe place to speak up. If team members can’t openly share their ideas, even the bad ones, they’ll withdraw from the discussion. Not only will you miss out on valuable input (even a bad idea can spark a trail of ideas that lead to a good one), but you’ll also miss out on something even more critical: engagement from your team members. Set the expectation of respect and make team meetings a safe space for new ideas. Set an example in the way you relate to the group. If someone shares an opinion that won’t work, thank them for their contribution. If you see team members speak down to one another, redirect the conversation, take the person aside privately, and encourage them to work on their open-mindedness. 2. Focus on Meaningful Priorities People can only focus on a few goals at a time, so limit the team’s focus to three or fewer specific goals at a time. Decide on a few inspiring and meaningful goals as a team. Make sure every team member understands how they can contribute and how achieving these goals impacts/benefits them. Set in motion an action plan and start tracking the team’s progress. 3. Get Everyone Involved in Problem-Solving Give your team a chance to build rapport with one another by involving them in team problem-solving tasks. This allows them to listen to each other and brainstorm together. It also helps get buy-in and builds engagement in the solutions the team devises. Ideally, don’t try to rush things. Whenever possible, let the discussion proceed until a consensus is reached. This can take time, but it allows everyone the chance to be heard. It will enable people to disagree and change course or forge meaningful compromises, which generates buy-in, a must-have in creating a collaborative team. 4. Invest in Your Team’s Development A team that advances in skills, advances their goals, and finds greater success. How will coaching or training add value to your team as a whole? How do development skills benefit individual team members? Investing in your team’s growth, both personally and as a whole, shows your team you care about their career growth. Providing that support can help reduce attrition and boost team members’ motivation at work. Get the Best from Your Employees Are you getting the most [...]

By |2023-10-30T10:49:29-04:00October 30th, 2023|Leadership Tips|
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4 Reasons to Be Assertive at Work

4 Reasons to Be Assertive at Work Being assertive at work means voicing your opinions and ideas with confidence. Assertiveness helps us set boundaries and ask for what we need without being rude or combative. Communicating assertively increases job satisfaction and creates win-win situations with our coworkers. It also allows us to recognize our feelings and build honest relationships with teammates. Here are 4 more reasons to use assertive communication at work. 1. Keeps the Focus on Your Idea, Not You One common problem we face at work is thinking we’ve communicated an idea more effectively than we actually have. For instance, if you share an idea in a meeting or email, and the tone is too soft, your comment may get lost in the conversation. Your teammates may not recognize that you’re asking for or proposing something. On the other hand, if you pitch an idea too forcefully, the idea gets lost as people react more to your delivery than the idea itself. Assertive communication uses clear, direct speech to explain an idea, allowing the idea to hold centerstage for discussion. 2. Gives You a Sense of Empowerment Assertive communication provides you with tools to make your needs heard. It helps you zero in on what you will and will not do so that you can state that clearly. Setting boundaries offers you a sense of control and autonomy. That sense of empowerment makes a big difference in your happiness and resilience at work. 3. Helps You Earn Respect One of the critical components governing the level of respect you have at work is how often you do what you said you’d do in the time you promised to do it. Here’s where assertiveness comes in. If you cannot ask for the resources you need to complete your work, it won’t get done. Assertive communication gives you a vehicle to ask for those resources and clearly state what you can do so the team can plan accordingly and count on your contributions. Assertive communication also helps those in leadership to set priorities and expectations so that team members know which tasks to focus on and what to do if they encounter problems. 4. Reduces Stress No one likes feeling unheard or as though their needs never make the priority list. It’s true in family relationships, and it’s true on the job, too. If you feel unheard as a leader or team member, assertive communication can help you break through that wall. Learning to speak up and state what you need firmly and clearly allows your coworkers to adjust their expectations and offer the support that helps the whole team succeed. Knowing you have a path to being heard reduces stress and ensures you have a safety net in your ability to speak up. Expert Training on Assertiveness at Work Mastering the balance of speaking assertively without being rude can be tricky, but it’s a skill worth learning. Our Assertiveness workshop teaches communication and conflict resolution styles and how to [...]

By |2023-11-24T19:16:33-04:00August 9th, 2023|Leadership Tips|
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5 Ways to Increase Happiness in Your Employees

5 Ways to Increase Happiness in Your Employees Happiness at work is essential to today’s workforce. What’s especially great is the fact that happiness in your employees creates benefits for the company they work for, too. Happier employees complete their work faster and are more creative. They’re also less likely to quit their jobs, even if they’re offered more money somewhere else, according to this analysis from Gallup. Having happy employees doesn’t happen by accident; it doesn’t simply mean hiring people with a positive attitude. Fostering and maintaining happiness in your employees is a deliberate effort. Here are 5 ways you can create a work environment that increases employee happiness and delivers the benefits of a happy crew to you. 1. Set the Example of Happiness Start your day on a positive note. Think about something you’re looking forward to doing or experiencing at work today. Smile and greet your team members, and be as genuine as possible. Smiles, like happiness, are contagious, foster open communication, and help to lift the mood of the people you encounter. 2. Show Appreciation Make a point to recognize a job well done on a regular basis. The simple act of saying thank you and taking note of a team member doing well not only boosts their confidence and self-esteem but also sends a message to the other team members that you’re engaged and you notice their work. 3. Be Flexible Whenever Possible Offering employees choices about where and how they accomplish their work gives them a sense of control. Allowing them to choose their hours and break times also promotes a sustainable work-life balance and means they will be more focused and productive during the time they’ve set aside to work. 4. Create Comfortable Collaboration Spaces Having a comfortable in-person or virtual break room is a significant benefit for your team. It creates a space where employees can disconnect from work for a few moments and mentally reset, and it provides a space where team members can collaborate, solve problems, and build relationships—all activities that benefit the health and happiness of the whole team. 5. Communicate with Transparency What’s your vision for your team? How do your team members contribute to that vision? What are they doing that’s making a difference in the world? Talk to your employees about your organization’s bigger picture and how their work contributes to the overall goals. Giving them this insight helps them feel significant and invested in the outcome of their work. Expert Training on Happiness at Work It is not difficult to be happy at work and foster happiness in your employees. You simply need to know the guiding principles. Our Happiness and Performance workshop teaches the variables most often correlated with happiness, including the role of work itself. Deepen your understanding of what promotes job satisfaction and dissatisfaction and what to do for team members who want to be happy or happier. Contact us today to set up a training session on Happiness and Performance [...]

By |2023-11-24T19:17:28-04:00June 30th, 2023|Happiness Tips, Leadership Tips|
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5 Tips for Successful Coaching

5 Tips for Successful Coaching Coaching is one of the most effective methods for leaders to use for performance improvement and for employee engagement. Not only does it help the individual develop and grow, but it shows that we are willing to invest in them and that we believe in their potential. Effective coaching leads to employees who are more proficient, work more independently, produce higher quality work and are more motivated. Successful coaching also increases the performance and ability of the team as a whole. Here are 5 great tips on coaching for success. 1. Give Team Members a Chance to Self-Assess First. Before offering your own insights, always give team members a chance to self-assess. Encouraging self-assessment assists in several ways. First, it encourages improvement even when you are not coaching. It also allows you to determine why the employee may not be performing as desired. For example, it may reveal that they don’t know they’re doing something incorrectly. Self-assessments also help team members build self-esteem. It reinforces the idea that you, as their manager or leader are listening to them, value their views, and consider them an important part of your team. It also increases the chance that problem behaviors will change. If an employee is not identifying areas that you identified (or has identified them incorrectly), use increasingly specific questions to allow the employee to self-assess, if possible.  This allows you to determine if the employee doesn’t know what’s expected, doesn’t have the skill, or simply chooses not to demonstrate the skill. Before moving on to other parts of your coaching session, be sure to reinforce the correct self-assessment. Defer or redirect inappropriate or incorrect self-assessment. 2. Next, Use Assessment Tools. There are different types of assessment tools that you can use to get even more information on the person. Their talent zones, development opportunities, blind spots and hidden potential. You can use psychometric questionnaires, potential assessments or 360° feedback tools. When you use an assessment tool on top of the self-assessment and your own observations, it adds objectivity and more in-detail information to help identify the focus and next steps. At KCC assessments are one of our specialties, we call these “x-rays”. 3. Limit the Focus. In coaching sessions, it’s best to focus on approximately two strengths that can be leveraged and about two areas for development.  Limiting the discussion is critically important for several reasons. First, focusing on just two areas for development helps ensure that the team member reaches proficiency. Adopting new procedures or breaking incorrect patterns is a challenging process. Adding too many changes to a team member’s to-do list all at once is likely to cause more frustration and confusion than success. It’s better to start with the two most important areas for improvement and focus on them to build that success and confidence. Once those areas have improved, there’s a positive track record showing improvement which will energize your team member and encourage them to continue increasing their proficiency. Once [...]

By |2022-03-28T13:45:50-04:00March 28th, 2022|Leadership Tips|
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Get a Fresh Start with These Tips for Managing a Hybrid Team

Get a Fresh Start with These Tips for Managing a Hybrid Team The new year is the perfect time to create a fresh start and update your skills in managing a hybrid team. You may have practices that used to fit your team that simply don’t work well today. We live in a new world in which employees may be at home, in the office, or some combination of both. From time to time, we all need to reevaluate our performance and change what we’re doing to meet new challenges and opportunities. Turning the calendar to a new year is a perfect time to freshen up our management approach with some new strategies for today’s agile teams. Here are 4 tips for sharpening your effectiveness as a leader and help in managing a hybrid team. 1. Communication is Key Whether your team works on site or remotely, one of the best ways to maintain a cohesive, productive team is to clearly communicate how you want things to operate. Be sure your preferences are clear as far as what types of issues or communications should be handled via an email versus scheduling a meeting. Make sure your team understands which projects have top priority, and any changes to the scope or deadline to your team’s work. Some hybrid team leaders have opted to have daily standups or check-in meetings at the start of each day. While that approach may not be right for every team, pay attention to the needs of your crew. While extroverted personalities are energized by spending time together (even virtually), introverted workers may find too many meetings to be disruptive and inhibit workflow. One approach for managing a hybrid team that fosters clear communication is to set an agenda for each meeting and send it out beforehand. If your team members review the agenda and determine they do not need to attend, they can skip some meetings and continue working. 2. Combat Natural Bias One issue faced by hybrid teams and their leadership is a natural bias toward members who work on campus. It’s sort of like the expression, “Out of sight, out of mind.”. We naturally think that team members who are in the office (whom we can visually see working) are more productive than team members who are working remotely, when this is probably not true. Managing a hybrid team effectively means you’ll need to work to correct that natural imbalance by connecting with your remote team members. Set regular one-on-one calls or video chats to briefly check in with them. Making sure they have what they need can go a long way toward making team members feel supported and valued. It also keeps their contributions to your overall team present in your mind as you lead. 3. Create Connections Leaders do so much more than herd a project toward completion by a specific deadline. They’re responsible for finding ways to pull a team of people together so that the resulting sum is greater than [...]

By |2022-01-18T13:09:29-04:00January 18th, 2022|Leadership Tips|
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4 Ways to Manage Perfectionism for Success

4 Ways to Manage Perfectionism for Success Perfectionism has recently been a big topic for discussion in the workplace. While perfectionists are highly motivated, dedicated workers, a study on perfectionism published in the Harvard Business Review states, “perfectionism is strongly and consistently related to numerous ‘detrimental’ work and non-work outcomes, including higher levels of burnout, stress, workaholism, anxiety, and depression.” Not only that, but another recent study of nearly 42,000 people published in the Harvard Business Review indicates that perfectionism is on the rise in the US, Canada and the UK. Now more than ever, we need great strategies to manage perfectionism in the workplace. How do we create a work environment that supports the assets perfectionists bring to our teams while helping to shield them from the potential harmful effects that can come from perfectionism? Here are 4 ways you can create a supportive environment where perfectionists can thrive, and your team can enjoy the benefits of having those highly motivated team members among you. 1. Model a Healthy Response to Mistakes How do you handle mistakes or a missed deadline? If you respond with grace and compassion, you’re modeling healthy behavior for your team. We are only human, right? Creating a workspace where it’s safe and normal to make mistakes can help perfectionists combat the need to achieve perfection every time on every task. At KCC, we love to remind ourselves that we don’t save lives so, if something doesn’t go the way we planned it, we find a solution and move on! 2. Set Reasonable, Healthy Goals Make sure your team’s goals are based on working at a sustainable pace. Having an all-hands, late-night, big push to complete a job once in a while is okay, but no one can keep up that pace indefinitely. In fact, it’s a recipe for burnout, especially for a perfectionist. Energy and expectation management are key! It’s important to emphasize resilience…Like Muhammed Ali once said, “There’s nothing wrong with getting knocked down, as long as you get right back up.” 3. Perform Regular Check-ins As deadlines approach, check in with your team, especially your perfectionists. Are they feeling a lot of pressure? Do they need help to prioritize or to break down a large goal into smaller, more achievable tasks? Jump in and offer support and ideas to make all team members more efficient. 4. Give Regular Positive Feedback It’s easy for a perfectionist’s inner critic to become the dominant voice giving feedback on their work. Offering regular, specific, positive feedback helps keep reasonable expectations and performance front and center. Remember, perfectionists are highly engaged people. Keeping that energy positive not only helps your team member stay in a healthier state, but brings even more motivation and energy to your whole team. Build Your Best Team Looking for more great strategies to build an effective team? Check out our workshop on Building Effective Teams and get information on best practices and tips for fully utilizing your team’s skills, styles and talents. Ingrid [...]

By |2021-10-19T11:54:34-04:00October 19th, 2021|Leadership Tips|
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