Engagement is often defined as the act of participating or becoming involved in something.

Employee engagement has become a key business strategy to increase an organization’s quality and financial performance and decrease absenteeism.

Engaged employees are different from satisfied employees. Engaged employees tend to exceed expectations, take more ownership over their work, volunteer for extra assignments and speak well of the organization that employs them.

Common techniques
Common techniques for engaging employees include offering greater recognition, communicating expectations, providing training and tools, and asking for input.

While important, sometimes these techniques are implemented in ways that invite but do not ignite active involvement of employees. For example, training is not always applied and communicating expectations to employees is only part of the process; employees’ expectations must be shared in return.

Participative and collaborative methods
Different from tactics that engage employees individually such as surveys, suggestion boxes, online portals, newsletters and supervision meetings, participatory and collaborative methods bring people together and involve dynamic, multidirectional communication (leadership to employees, employees to leadership and employee to employee).

This approach is especially useful for collective planning, problem solving, generating new ideas, developing projects, learning, setting goals, dealing with crisis or change, spurring a cultural shift, designing a new space or identifying business opportunities and risks.

An experienced, neutral third party process facilitator can lead workshops and meetings of this nature to ensure these sessions are conducted efficiently, generate quality content and achieve tangible results.

However, there are many basic participatory and collaborative skills and practices that can be learned and applied by organizational leaders in everyday activities such as meetings. These include: questioning techniques to keep whole group conversations productive and focused; idea generation frameworks that move from brainstorming to synthesis to action; problem-solving approaches that use creative thinking effectively; and ways of structuring meetings to make them more interesting and interactive.

Benefits
Concrete, credible results, accelerated project timelines and an opportunity for constructive dialogue between people with diverse perspectives are among the many benefits of getting everyone in the same room at the same time.

Meaningful participation and collaboration are mutually beneficial. Employees want to contribute their ideas in a purposeful way to the workplace. Likewise, as this is a time when companies are focused on maximizing their productivity, involving employees at every level in problem solving, process improvement and strategic thinking has never been more important. When employees have a chance to share their observations and expertise through a dynamic interchange with leadership and their colleagues, morale increases and employees feel empowered and energized.

Tamara Eberle is a certified professional facilitator and managing partner at Traction Strategy in Toronto. Traction Strategy provides professional group facilitation and consultation services.