To drive more engagement with your team and improve the group’s outputs, you need to demonstrate an ability to enhance or enrich work. Doing the same old tasks repeatedly can get boring. As team members master their roles, you need to switch it up to break up the monotony. I believe that quarterly (every 3-4 months), something new needs to be introduced to the team. It could be a new tool, process, or change in responsibility.
Ways to Enhance Work
Create project groups
Design tasks to increase employee ownership and to encourage workers to view their jobs as necessary. Depending on your team’s size, you could develop project groups centered around critical themes: Employee Engagement & Fun, Process Improvements, or New Tools.
Combine tasks
Put existing fragmented tasks together to form larger modules of work. This can help increase skill variety and task identity. Periodically reviewing these tasks and processes can lead to new improvements or ways of doing work differently. Sometimes you may be able to combine work together to create something new.
Expand jobs vertically
Giving employees responsibilities formerly reserved for leaders closes the gap of doing and controlling, which increases autonomy. To get your people to evolve their skills, look at what you might be able to delegate. It frees you up for more value-added tasks while giving them a personal development opportunity.
Establish new relationships
Build direct relationships between the work and other teams or customers – the users of the product or service that the employee works on. Look for ways to build bridges to other groups while increasing skill variety, autonomy, and feedback. Forging key relationships across departmental lines will aid in the collective success of your team as well.
Improve feedback channels
Feedback tells employees how well they perform and whether their performance is improving, deteriorating, or remaining constant. Have team members involved in potentially peer reviewing work, providing them with training on coaching others. Setting up a peer training model to help with new hire onboarding can also be very useful.
Enhancing Work Is About Creating Autonomy
Managers can encourage and increase autonomy by doing the following:
- Allowing employees to approach anyone they need for help instead of going through levels of bureaucracy.
- Give them the authority to use resources; however, they choose without the need for restrictive approvals.
- Permit them to take necessary actions to get the work done by empowering them.
Final Thought
It’s important to always give employees a say in their work. Most employees prefer to determine how they work best. They prefer to be assigned a task and given the freedom to develop a plan of attack that suits them. By creating a culture of autonomy and empowerment, you will not only enhance their work but create a more engaging environment.
