Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance, and we are continuing our deep dive into collaboration. And today we're putting the spotlight. On engagement. And if you really think about it, that couldn't be a better topic to be talking about. Then employee engagement, you know, getting our team alive, contributing, listening, learning, discussing.

Contributing to the product, you know, doing something that matters together, not sitting in silos. That's what we mean. When we talk about engagement and boy did we come across a really solid insight and here it is around engagement. If you want to have that thriving, vibrant culture, then the starting point for that [00:01:00] engagement is this everyone and their ideas.

Are welcome. Let's talk about that some more. So the context here is that nothing has killed employee engagement, like forcing everybody to work home for a really sustained period. It's like, come on. When will this end? And as the novelty wore off during quarantine in 2020, the new challenge sort of percolated up to product teams.

When they're, when they're thinking about working together, it's all about getting out of just doing. The essentials, just plodding along and coping with all of this change. It's all about finding out how we can ensure our teams. Our teammates are involved, contributing. They're vibrant. They're feeling satisfied and fulfilled by our work.

And that often comes to contributing and often comes through engagement. And if it's. Contributing to the product, to the product vision, or maybe the company's vision [00:02:00] itself, no matter where you channel that energy, the engagement is essential. If you really want to have a thriving environment. So let's dig into the data that we found from our trends report.

Now here's, what's really interesting. We were. Asking over a hundred survey, respondents and interviewees for all around the world. We said to them, which of the following activities is the most challenging for your business? When you're trying to align with teammates now, you know, a lot of them said actually creating professional and personal boundaries.

That's no problem setting clear goals and objectives. Take getting everyone together for a tricky conversation. No problem now what's interesting is that tricky conversation? I, Hey Houston, we have a problem. That's really interesting about that. It registered very low as a challenge when you're making a product and aligning with teammates, [00:03:00] but here's the big one.

This one got a lot of feedback. In answer to the question of like, okay, what is the biggest challenge when you're trying to align is getting people in engaged in the brainstorm and out of their inboxes. So you've all seen it, that people will be on calls, hardly contribute there. They're looking off to the side because actually they're in their inbox, cleaning stuff out, or maybe better still there on Facebook or what ever.

The point here is that you desk, you, you really want that contribution, particularly in a brainstorm because unlike the tricky conversation, I, cause that's really just reacting to a problem why it's so important to have contributions in brainstorms. As you can bring people into the present that you can really enjoy [00:04:00] sparking ideas  thinking about how might we, what if these kinds of really powerful questions and prompts and getting out of the drudgery of the day to day and exploring the potential of the tomorrow.

And what you'll find is that your colleagues are a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration. If. Given the chance to engage properly. And this looks to me to be one of the biggest problems we're going to face in 2021, getting people, dusting them, all the cobwebs out and saying, come on, let's think together where we can entertain possibilities and new things.

So let's break this down and see how we might solve this as well. So, what we know is that 51% found getting people engaged is the most challenging practice in team alignment. Huge. If you benchmark that against all the other data in the pot, it's one of the strongest [00:05:00] signals that we got and the way we can unlock this is welcoming.

All people and all of their ideas, this needs to be a deliberate, purposeful, rigorous practice, because we all know that there are certain people in the team who are just not naturally going to speak up. And to be honest, between you and me, they're the ones that probably have the best ideas too. So you've got to go.

And hunt for those. So the first recommendation I have is how you in your role can make that happen. You need to serve your teammates. You need to ask yourself how you can help your colleague contribute. What conditions would they need to contribute? To provide insight, facts, data analysis, recommendations, whatever you need from them.

What do they [00:06:00] need to do that? Because remember, a lot of people are not like me. I'm a bit of a chatterbox, but some super wicked smart people can be sitting there and they could have great ideas, but they just don't feel comfortable contributing, ask yourself how you can make them comfortable in. Setting conditions that they actually would like to share.

So a great thing you can do here is always be the last to speak. Let, let your colleagues contribute. Now, if you are interested in this, this is what we call servant leadership. Just Google it. There is a ton of work written about how you can serve your teammates and your colleagues. I think this is the underlying recommendation, serve your teammates.

And then I want to come back to what I was saying. You are like. Show look. So you must go in search out contributions from everyone, not just the usual suspects. Who are confident talking in a group, you must go out and [00:07:00] get everyone, bring them to the conversation. Step one, to ask them for contribution, get contribution, come hell or high water.

However they need to give it. You want to get old people engaging because if you create a safety net where everybody feels comfortable to contribute, something starts to happen. All right, so let's just pause it there. So you have to ask yourself, how do I serve my teammates and you, then you, then you need to go out and be deliberate about getting their contribution, getting them in the room, number one and two, then getting their contribution.

So now what happens when you do that? The ideas, or perhaps they're just real facts, data, maybe do some analysis of the data, whatever it is, it could be the big idea. You want to make sure that your colleagues [00:08:00] challenge it, right. Improve it and then own it. This is what engagement looks like. Challenging ideas, improving ideas, and owning their ideas.

Let's talk about challenging him. We have to find a way, if you want employee engagement, if you want your teammates to be vibrant contributing, they have to be in the room. They have to be giving their thoughts. And when you give yours, give them license to challenge those ideas, because I can tell you not one single idea that I have when I sit by myself is nearly anywhere near as good as an idea that I share, because frankly.

All the super smart people that build challenge on my idea. They improve it. They make it better. They add more context. Maybe they sharpen it up. And here's the other thing. Once an idea is being challenged, maybe the facts of being challenged, maybe improve our understanding of the [00:09:00] facts. Then what happens becaus...