Engaging team members during this overwhelming time Your team is off-site, on-site, asked to pick up other work, managing re-assignments, performing 2 jobs. Oh My Goodness - how do you have time to engage in quality time with every team member?!
Team member engagement - an investment in your team? Certainly.
What an incredible return on your investment in time! Less stress ⭐ More focus and energy⭐ Increased openness and trust ⭐ Faster problem solving and decision making ⭐ More pride in work ⭐ Retention!! ⭐ and Increase productivity and capacity!
Where to invest your engagement time?
Embed team engagement into work routines.
In Daily Work
- Use team huddles and the Continual Improvement System so that all team members can stay aligned, focused, share pain/problems/improvement ideas, and jointly identify and solve problems together. This helps you fix problems as they occur rather them allowing them to grow and fester.
- Take Gemba walks to truly understand the work and how to best support higher performance. Learn how to do this in Leaders Leading an Improvement Culture.
- Use Standardized work instructions to clarify and standardized the work so that team members can focus on new, more challenging innovations. Link to more
Organization Direction
- Create listening posts, evaluate, and act (timely), Communicate actions.
- Include others in creating plans, i.e., gathering data, evaluating data and making decisions. Learn more in Strategic & Annual Planning
- Involve others (customers, team members, suppliers, partners) in improvement projects. Establish goals, provide support, and remove barriers.
- Plan and provide workforce develop learning and sharing opportunities. "We are investing in you because you are valuable."
Check out more ideas here, in the Value-Waste Challenge! Link
As you give these a try - please share so that you can be recognized and we can learn from your success!