The Joy of Team Engagement

 Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown

Despite the gobs of money spent on employee engagement programs, globally in 2024, employee engagement has declined to just 21%, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, “quiet quitting” describes half the U.S. workforce, and “job-hugging” indicates employees are staying in jobs out of fear rather than commitment. What's going wrong? Companies are treating engagement as something they do to employees rather than something that emerges from the daily relationships employees have with their teams and managers.

Since William A Kahn wrote “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work,” published in the Academy of Management in 1990, the term “Employee Engagement” has been in the lexicon of business thinkers and writers.  Kahn used the term “personal engagement,” but the writing quickly moved to the term “Employee Engagement.” Khan highlighted three psychological conditions necessary for achieving employee engagement: meaningfulness, psychological safety, and availability.

Meaningfulness encompasses all aspects tied to the job itself.  Meaningfulness flows not only from the work output but also from the process to accomplish the work. Psychological Safety is doing the work without fear of mistakes, as well as the social dynamics at work. Availability is the employee’s energy, both physical and emotional, along with their ability to enjoy a life outside work. All of these are in the context of relationships. The relationship an employee has with the organization as a whole, to be sure, but more importantly, the relationship the employee has with the members of their team.  

Too often, companies lose sight of the importance of the relationship with each employee as an individual. We get company-wide recognition programs, but being named "Employee of the Quarter" doesn't build the psychological safety within an employee's immediate team. It doesn’t drive engagement. Annual engagement surveys often treat engagement as an individual psychological state to be measured and managed top-down, rather than understanding engagement to be fundamentally about relationships. Mandatory fun events, which reduce the time employees have to do their work, encroach on their time to enjoy life outside of work, when the deadlines remain the same. These and other employee engagement efforts are well-intentioned but miss the mark because their focus is on the transaction and not the relationship. They can still be valuable as signs of appreciation, but they are not sufficient to drive engagement, and they flatly fail when they become expectations.

Team Engagement versus Employee Engagement

If Employee Engagement has become more about what the organization can give to the employee, then a reframing of the relationship may be valuable. Team Engagement is about the relationship that each employee has with their team, including their manager. 

Employees leave managers, not companies

First Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman

The importance of the relationship between manager and employee runs to the very top of organizations. We have conducted hundreds of interviews about people’s best team experience and what Joy at Work means to them. The initial findings of that work are outlined in The Guide to Joy at Work. Those interviews range from very junior employees to the most senior executives, and from small businesses to the Fortune 100. Universally, people talk about the importance of their manager in creating the best team experience and in growing Joy at Work. A quality manager, who creates Team Engagement, sets up the conditions for that team to be the best team experience for an employee.  

The operative word is “willingness.” It is a true interaction between the employee and their manager. The employee must be willing to engage in the behaviors that constitute the 10 Dimensions of Joy at Work, and managers, as the representatives of the organization, must continually invite them to do so. The 10 Dimensions of Joy at Work are about an employee’s relationship with their team. They are willing to be accountable to their team. They are willing to trust their team. They are willing to act with integrity toward their team. Without the invitation from their manager to display willingness across the 10 Dimensions of Joy at Work, an employee will slowly start to display less and less willingness and therefore have less and less Joy at Work.

Even when the team members are making those invitations to each other, the lack of manager engagement reduces Joy at Work. The result, again and again, is diminishing effectiveness of the organization as employees pull back from doing their best work and even leave the organization. Looking back over the last few years of management’s treatment of employees due to the pandemic and the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, as well as other shocks, the phenomena of “quiet quitting,” which is active disengagement, and “job-hugging,” which is passive disengagement, become less surprising. Living in a context of mass firings over video and CEOs energetically describing the cost savings (read layoffs) coming from the use of Artificial Intelligence, it should surprise no one that employees are less willing to engage in the 10 Dimensions of Joy at Work. To get people back, managers will have to make a significant reversal and re-recruit their best employees.

Joy and Team Engagement

A read of the major academic studies and more popular business books on engagement can be summarized into these core areas of focus.

1. Job design (variety, autonomy, significance, feedback)
2. Interpersonal support and psychological safety
3. Fair processes and treatment
4. Creating conditions for energy, meaning, and concentration
5. Recognizing the social and contextual nature of engagement

These all seem reasonable enough, but the question then is “How?” How is a manager supposed to make them happen?

Meaningfulness answers “Does their work matter?”

Operational Ladder: Managers, who create an explicit connection between the work employees do and the positive outputs the organization produces, are showing employees why their work matters. The nurse's aid performing tasks labeled as menial can enjoy Team Engagement if their manager can show how those tasks better the lives of others. A highly paid stockbroker can feel the onslaught of burnout dealing with the vagaries of client requests, but a manager reframing the work to create a legacy for family and philanthropy can move the stockbroker toward Team Engagement

Leadership Bubble: Managers need a way to grow their own level of meaningfulness at work. They can do that by expanding their own responsibilities and impact. To do that without burnout, managers will need to move some of their responsibilities to their employees. The leadership bubble provides a framework for doing that by guiding the manager to imagine which of their responsibilities an employee is ready to take on and then creating a plan to delegate it to them with support. The manager becomes freer to pursue other responsibilities, and the employee is shown that their work has meaning.

Psychological Safety answers “Am I OK to try this?”

Leadership Bubble (again): Managers who actively look for ways to expand an employee’s responsibilities and capabilities show the value of the work that the employee performs. The Leadership Bubble provides a guide for managers to continue to expand an employee’s responsibilities and allow them to fail, such that they are learning but not harming themselves or the organization. It is this failure without damage that builds psychological safety while the employee grows in capability.

Failing Fast: This much-touted Silicon Valley approach to development is valuable for building psychological safety, but with one strong caveat. Failing Fast should be constructed as an experiment. The outcome may not be certain, but managers need to ensure that employees make a prediction. Measures should be put in place so that an employee knows when the work is on track and meeting the prediction or not. Without this approach, Failing Fast is just failing. There is nothing to learn along the way because the only signal of success comes at the end.

Availability answers “Can I get meaning in all aspects of my life?”

The 10x Meeting: Much of organizational life happens in the form of meetings. No other construct is more maligned in blog posts and chats at the coffee station. Meetings are often considered a waste of time, but they can be a rich and often far better use of time than any other approach. To achieve that outcome, managers need to be very deliberate in how meetings are structured and conducted. Imagine meetings that are worth 10x the time an employee might spend at their desk. Imagine meetings that people look forward to attending because they are so valuable and so engaging. To do this, managers must look at each aspect of a meeting and examine if it could be done in a more efficient way, like an email. They should construct meetings to have interaction and discussion. Ultimately, problems should be solved and decisions should be made for a meeting to be a success.

The 25% Reduction: With the expectations for every employee rising each year, there must be some activities that employees do today that they do not do in the future or at least do in less time.  Each year, every employee should reflect on what it would take to get back 25% of their time so that they can apply it to all the work that is coming their way. The large reduction is purposeful. It pushes employees to make a dramatic change, and not just adjust at the margins. There are three possibilities: delegate the task, stop doing the task, or do the task in less time. These can happen for any role. The delivery driver who calls ahead to let the recipient know when to expect the delivery is cutting out time waiting to get into a building. The manager, who delegates drafting the initial budget that they have been doing for the last nine years, is not only creating capacity for themselves, but also elevating another employee. The leader, who decides that continuing to do a long-running customer survey that the organization rarely takes action on, is showing that all tasks are up for review and possible elimination. All of these cases start to take the time pressure off employees so that they have time available for all aspects of their lives, not just work.

Measurement answers: "Are we getting anywhere?"

Since creating Team Engagement is a form of Change, using the three-tiered approach that we advocate for any Change will be helpful to know if Team Engagement is improving or not.

Self-Reported: Often discovered through surveys, self-reported metrics on Team Engagement come directly from the employees. To get real insights, questions have to be carefully chosen. Ask overly self-serving questions, and little insight will be gained. Use a poorly constructed scale, and interpretation becomes impossible.

Observable: Getting input on what others see, especially managers, will provide insights that cannot be obtained in a survey. It is rare to spend any time in an organization and not be able to get a sense of Team Engagement quickly. Even when putting on a mask of engagement, employees will fatigue, and the reality they feel will show through. It is observable through employees’ questions and actions.

Existing Metrics: As with most things in organizational life, the impact of all activities eventually flows into the operating and financial metrics that are used to measure success. Attrition and productive output would certainly change with changes in Team Engagement. Unfortunately, these tend to be lagging metrics. When they head in the wrong direction, the problem has been festering for a while.

The combination of all these metrics provides a fuller view of what is happening and allows managers to take action to improve Team Engagement. You can learn more of the techniques on how to create a set of metrics like this in our Data-Driven Change Management course.

Joy at Work

Managers do not need yet another thing to do or yet another thing to fail at doing. The path to Team Engagement, however, is blazed by what managers do and is obscured by what they omit. Fortunately, even small things can have outsized impacts. The organizations that clearly have Joy at Work and the Team Engagement that comes with it are not the ones who drive large initiatives aimed at engagement. It is not the automatically generated email with a code to buy an item from a website focused on employee appreciation that creates Team Engagement. It is the manager who pauses in the middle of a meeting to recognize a great bit of work. 

Start small. Pick one practice. Apply it consistently. Watch what happens when employees feel their work has meaning, when they're safe to grow and try, and when they have the energy to bring their full selves. That's not just engagement—that's Joy at Work