Transforming Work Culture: New strategies for Boosting Employee Involvement

Proceedings of the International Conference on Leadership, Culture, and Talent Management

Year: 2024

DOI:

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Transforming Work Culture: New strategies for Boosting Employee Involvement

Alankar Karpe

ABSTRACT:

Elevating engagement among your team members poses a challenge for any leader. It’s imperative to cultivate a passion and enthusiasm for their roles. Every team encounter changes and conflicts, but engaged team members navigate these challenges differently from their disengaged counterparts. This session aims to equip leaders with effective strategies to enhance team engagement, providing them with the tools and skills necessary for driving team success.

The myriad responsibilities faced by most managers often seem insurmountable, with a constant influx of new initiatives from senior leadership. Rather than viewing meaningful conversations as an additional burden for already stressed supervisors, consider investing in their development by enhancing their coaching skills based on their strengths. Gallup’s research conducted in the aftermath of the pandemic reveals that employees in collaborative roles, prepared for remote work, exhibit higher engagement and wellbeing when working on-site two to three days per week. To propel team engagement to the next level, leaders can adopt five strategic approaches, fostering a more energized and committed team:

1. Collaboration and relationships: Do not shy away from conflicts and difference of opinions. As a leader, we have to make sure that this leads to a healthy discussion on how to achieve our objectives rather than drifting away further from it.
2. Instant recognition: In order to reinforce the positive behaviour, actions which propel the team towards its objective, recognition plays a very crucial role.
3. Clarity of goals and priorities: Constant communication between leaders and the team and within the team should be advocated to increase the clarity of the goals and the sharpening of the eyes of the team members to recognise what is the priority among the tons of pending items. The team should clearly understand the ‘why’ part so that the efforts are targeted in that direction.
4. Focus on team member’s strengths: In my opinion, focussing on strength brings a lot more positive results than discussing on the weaknesses of a team member. We need to recognise that we all are results of our culture, backgrounds, beliefs and values and no person is willing nor interested to change his or her beliefs to work in a project.
5. Meaningful conversations: These are those discussions that go beyond surface-level exchanges and delve into those topics that hold significance, depth, and relevance for the team members. Meaningful conversations can cover a wide range of subjects, including personal goals, values, challenges, and aspirations. In a professional context, meaningful conversations between leaders and team members may involve discussing career development, providing feedback, addressing concerns, and aligning individual goals with organizational objectives.

These conversations often involve sharing thoughts, feelings, ideas, and experiences in a sincere and authentic manner, needless to say that they help the team to increase their engagement to the next level.

keywords: Employee Engagement, Leadership, team strength, motivation