How to enable team engagement & wellbeing
How to enable team engagement & wellbeing
“Though the tunnel is dark, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. You just can’t see it now” – Lawrence Mitchell
Through the wonders of technology, I was able to join a team of UK and European-based b2b marketers to talk about resilience, mindset, wellbeing, and essentially how do we cope in a situation where things are very different and there are a number of problems to solve:
- Covid-19 Cases are rising
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Winter is coming
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Christmas parties will be different
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The novelty of home working has gone
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There’s no end in sight
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The old rule book has been torn up
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A new rule book is being written
- Things are very uncertain
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Onboarding new employees is challenging
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Many people are going through this level of change for the very first time
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Boundaries are vanishing
In this perfect storm context, as a leader, the big question was: how do you keep chirpy, keep the team engaged, motivated and ultimately psychologically well? With so much pressure on leaders, this was the heart of the discussion at the b2b Marketing Leadership round table.
It’s a big question, and as always with big questions, there aren’t easy answers, but through the power of sharing, solutions do emerge. Here’s a summary of some of the insights from the discussion:
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Accept the situation, you can’t change it, so accept what is and work with what you have.
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Dial up all of your personal wellbeing habits to look after yourself and be at your best to support the team as everyone’s problems are your problems! As Dr Marcus Raney said: ‘Self care and Self Love are not Selfish’. I like this.
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Show that you’re human. You might be leading the charge, but you are human and will experience the same range of emotions as everyone else. It’s fine to have bad days, just remember that your behaviour will set the tone.
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Be compassionate and get the balance right between supporting your people emotionally and helping them to do their jobs and be productive.
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Things will get better. As history has shown over and over ‘on the other side of adversity is growth’
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Remember that you and your team are highly adaptable and programmed for survival – you can do this
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Go back to basics and ask the underlying questions that will drive your culture and team wellbeing :what’s our purpose as a business ?What’s important to us as a collective?
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Work with what you have – innovation loves constraints and you have some great tools at your finger tips
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Get to know your team – you may seem them by the jobs they do, but they are whole people with passions, skills and ideas. Tap into this energy and try to align individual passions with work to tap into intrinsic motivations and strengthen the team.
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Data, data, data. Build a team wellbeing dashboard to understand the emotional wellbeing of your remote team. There are many tools in the market that will help you spot issues.
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Keep things fresh – plan new, themed engagement campaigns every month to introduce an element of learning, inspiration and fun – we all want to have fun!
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Do a weekly video update to help the team know what’s happening, what the focus is for that week, the challenges ahead and, of course, the wins and the reasons for celebration!
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Set up a buddy system to give people someone to chat to, provide accountability and connection
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Invest in helping people to reframe their mindsets. Research shows that leaders believe that 74% of success in marketing comes from having a winning mindset. As Wayne Dyer once said :’When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.’
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Be flexible, but have some clear boundaries between work and personal life so that you can set yourself up for success.
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Vary the engagement tools – zoom fatigue is a thing, so plan walk and talk meetings using the phone. Ideal for one to ones and it will tick many boxes in our wellbeing & resilience toolkit: movement, connection to natural world, connection to other people and more.
So, there you have it. It was a great session, thanks to Joel Harrison from B2B Marketing for setting it up.
I think my ultimate conclusion is that there isn’t a right or wrong. It’s ok to be scared, it’s ok to worry, but, and it’s a big but, keep those negative emotions in balance as there’s always a silver lining, even if you can’t see it right now.
Let me leave you with a quote that I read years in 2008 when I was CMO and was seeking ways to keep a big team engaged during stormy and changing times. It made me realise that the smallest things have the biggest impact.
