The largest ever UK study of barriers to team engagement challenges conventional thinking about the way engagement is measured and suggests that teams are often nowhere near as engaged as their organisations think they are.
The joint Engage for Success/Ashridge Executive Education/Oracle study shows that only a quarter of UK teams are giving their best at work, while almost a third (32%) are actively disengaged.
The findings suggest that the engagement surveys typically relied on by organisations may not be an accurate reflection because in reality teams are not simply either engaged or disengaged. In fact, team engagement comes in ‘shades of grey’, with some either just ‘satisfied’ or presenting an illusion of engagement because that is what the organisation wants to hear.
The report also emphasises the vital role team leaders play as the makers or breakers of engagement. It shows that the three most important factors for team engagement are:
- Challenging and varied work
- Working with trusted colleagues, and
- Having a team leader who is trusted and leads by example
The research paper, Shades of Grey: An Exploratory Study of Engagement in Work Teams, is based on a study of 195 participants from 28 teams across seven industry sectors.
Organisations in the study varied from SMEs to UK-based multi-nationals, from sectors ranging from government and aviation to chemicals and healthcare.
The research was conducted by Ashridge Executive Education at Hult International Business School in association with Oracle and the UK government’s Engage for Success.
Read the original research paper by A Armstrong, S Olivier and S Wilkinson, here: http://bit.ly/2TSWEir