Reflection on Improving Team Engagement

A team is a living and breathing entity. Various events, challenges and changes can impact team morale and engagement over time. Therefore, building an engaging team is not a one-time activity but a continuous journey. 

As a leader, reflect regularly based on observations and facts, and come up with different ideas to improve team engagement. 

Here are some ideas to improve team engagement from my old notebooks when I started leading a new team several years ago: 

• Make sure to have regular 1-on-1 with each team member. 
• Ask for feedback, about you and the team. 
• Planning and backlog refinement: ask everyone to bring a laptop and contribute to the story/task breakdown and estimation. 
• Rotate the facilitation of retrospectives. 
• Standup: be curious and ask questions if something is not clear. Also, shoutout outstanding efforts and contributions. 
• What about “Thank You Thursday”?
• Research more on retrospectives. 
• How to visualise upcoming milestones and risks on a wall?
• What about a futurespective wall?
• Read Management 3.0. 
• Send kudos – physical/digital Kudo card. 
• Ask team members to facilitate planning. 
• Ask the team members to represent the team in the company-wide developer forum. 
• Ask the team members to represent the team in the company-wide team showcase. 

No matter at what stage your team is at you will always discover new ideas to improve team engagement. So never stop thinking about them regularly. Take actions and create a better work environment.