Building an Engaged Community During Change

 

Employee engagement can be promoted in a variety of policies and practices within an organization. This month's gantthead theme is Change Management and maintaining engagement is critical to achieving success. The problem with maintaining engagement during large changes is that change typically interferes with factors that improve engagement. Here experts list great practices to engage workers, and, for keeping engagement during significant changes, I've derived a couple more useful tactics.

Build Shared Purpose . . . Instead of seeing large change as "the problem," you can take leadership action by communicating a new story:  that there is new competitive threat, marketplace shift or other outside danger and everyone must adjust so that the organization can successfully react. Instead of your project being a part of the problem, it becomes part of the shared purpose that brings everyone together.

Build Feeling of Community . . . Once everyone has a shared purpose, it is time to expand on that foundation. You want to create the feeling that  everyone can work together and  benefit from that relationship. You want them to be working together, not as individual work teams, departments or divisions. For example, promote in project communications

• using the established process which allows all groups to work together efficiently (if this is true, of course)
• using difficulties between groups as opportunities to solve problems immediately to maintain progress
• incidents where groups have worked out difficulties and appaud their efforts
• the availability of social media for use by the project to help participants work togther more closely

A feeling of shared purpose and community innoculates your project from a host of daily annoyances brought about by workers who are working in the same project, but not really together. Engagement is social.