What Affects Engagement (2/2)
Table stakes and landmines
In the last three weeks, we looked at ways to track engagement on a single team, a larger organization, and a few themes that affect engagement.
This post covers a few more themes that affect engagement. If you are mindful of these themes and avoid a couple of landmines, you’ll see engagement naturally drift in a positive direction. Positively engaged engineers ship the best software!
Part of the Whole
Engineers that understand how their work relates to what the company is doing or how it positively impacts its users and customers are more engaged than engineers that can't connect their work to a larger picture.1
Most engineers are in the profession because they genuinely like to build things and take great pride in what they produce. Engagement suffers if the team doesn't know how their work adds or creates value in this world.
As manager, you can help draw a narrative in clear and concise language that explains how everyone's craft fits into the larger picture. You can write a memo, tell a story, organize an all-hands, rely on your 1:1s, or do it over a happy hour — it's ok to repeat yourself on multiple channels to make sure everyone truly gets it.
This theme is table stakes — a clear understanding of how a team's work relates to the company is necessary but not sufficient for healthy engagement on your team.
Fairness
Humans value fairness and can innately perceive instances of unfair behavior2. As manager, you want to avoid unfairness at all times and instead create a culture of transparency built on empathy and accountability. Fairness is another table stakes theme — necessary but not sufficient — for fostering engagement on the team.
Fairness is best illustrated by examples of unfairness — favoritism, pitching peers against each other (read zero-sum games), tolerating bad behavior and allowing it to continue (or more correctly, allowing behavior that is not consistent with the values of the team), compensation inconsistencies, etc. — you get the idea. Favoritism is a tricky one that can creep in even if you have the best intentions.
Some of these less-than-excellent behaviors can be mistaken for being subtle but remember that people are really good at spotting instances of unfairness and injustice — everyone knows when it’s happening. Without a discussion about morals, engagement is negatively affected when there are occurrences or perceptions of unfairness.
Silos Fracture Engagement
Humans are also social — we flourish in the company of others in real life, and the same carries over to work. On teams spread across several projects, it's sometimes common for engineers to work by themselves in silos. Working on projects with little to nothing in common with others results in fewer social interactions and opportunities for collaboration, which puts downward pressure on engagement.
Too many silos may indicate a team with a too weak or too broad a charter. This is easy to observe on teams that are built around a particular skill rather than a goal (for example, an SRE team that works with several product teams.) As manager, identifying common, unifying tasks and themes across different projects allows engineers to pair up occasionally. Even if it may appear inefficient for two engineers to tackle something that one can handle, it unlocks secondary benefits like reducing single failure points and setting the stage for healthily engaged engineers.
Engagement Recap
This post is the fourth part in a series on engagement. In a nutshell, a transparent culture built on fairness and a team that truly understands the value they add are table stakes for engagement. Further, individual engagement trends positive when career paths are well defined there is ample room to grow without impediment.
As managers, tracking and measuring engagement is on-going activity so that we can swiftly take action when required. Some easy ways to keep up with engagement levels on your team were covered in the first three parts —
Part I
Part II
Part III
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https://hbr.org/2012/12/to-give-your-employees-meaning
https://hbr.org/2006/03/why-its-so-hard-to-be-fair https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/how-we-learn-fairness