Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.

Random Related Fun Fact of the Week: The most effective teams don’t have formal leaders! Teams work best when members listen and talk in equal measure. If one member takes control and begins to dominate the discussions, it creates resentment. The team falters. Effective teams do need managers, though. Diverse teams are more creative and get more done but they require a team manager (not an individual contributor) whose full time job is to help team members communicate and work together, despite their diversity.

You might be part of an organization that has just completed or are in the middle of an employee engagement survey process with the results either complete or due back due very soon. What comes back is a lot of data highlighting strengths to leverage, opportunities for improvement and hundreds, if not thousands of written comments! (You will never believe some of the things people write when asked to comment in an anonymous survey!)

So now what? Organizations often hand the results to HR for follow-up. Other organizations delegate next steps to front line managers, or like many, unfortunately choose to do nothing.

Our recommendation?

If you want better employee engagement, you better engage the employees! This year try doing this, tap cross-functional, high potential employees with a charter to review the survey results, develop a core set of recommendations with an action plan. Present that plan to senior leadership, and then assist in turning those recommendations into enhanced employee engagement.

Our experienced has shown amazing results. From engagement teams creating a new hire “passport” program that addressed a gap in organizational onboarding for one client, to developing a series of cross functional “Performance Action Teams” (PAT’s) that form, perform and then re-form as performance issues are identified throughout this organization. These PAT’s intervene in the performance drift to quickly address both new and past performance gaps.

And this is just a small glimpse at some of the incredible results engagement teams like these have achieved. An additional benefit to engaging an employee-led team, when you add this question to next year’s engagement survey, “Has anything changed since the last engagement survey?”, it has been our experience that 90% or more of the employees will say yes!

So, don’t let this year’s survey results fall into the dreaded and powerful “blackhole of engagement surveys”. Put that data in the hands of those that can and will make a difference, the employees!

If you need help or examples on engagement team best practices, let us know, we exist to enable engagement success.

For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!

Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.