Do you know the emotional culture of your team? Have you even ever thought about this?
One thing is clear: employee engagement doesn't necessarily mean employee satisfaction. You can have satisfied employees but only partially or worse, absolutely not engaged.
Engaged employees make a difference
The important difference lies in the emotions. Engaged employees are emotionally connected to their company, their team and its goals. This means that these employees highly care for their work and company and this beyond their pay check or potential promotion in the company. Having this in mind, wouldn’t it make more sense to measure the engagement of your employees then rather than only their satisfaction?
Now, to do so, one needs to be prepared to tackle the topic of emotions. What are the emotions you want to feel and see more have versus the ones that are getting in your way? It's important to be aware of both. Knowing what your people want to feel in order to be happy and successful is vital in order to create the desired company and team culture. The same goes for the undesired emotions. Being aware of what people don't want to feel (but might still be feeling this from time to time) will help you define team behaviors and action steps to protect yourselves when these will occur.
Focus on employees
For anybody having worked with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) you know how valuable the data collected from your clients is. The same goes for your internal clients, meaning your employees. Companies focusing on their employees' well-being could also be using a CRM system to help measure the companies' emotional culture and define the desired and undesired behaviors. These will reinforce the emotional culture of the teams.
Eventually it's quite simple: your success relies on your people feeling what THEY defined as desired emotions and not on what you think is needed. Covid-19 challenged us in many ways. Thinking that because I am a coach, I wouldn't be challenged would be an illusion. Nobody was prepared for this and each of us, as human beings, needed to find its own way through the unknown and its possible darkness.
One of the opportunities I got out of this situation is to be the first worldwide online certified riders & elephants’ practitioner! A certified Emotional Culture Deck practitioner and one of the very first certified in Europe. An additional tool to add to my coaching toolbox. An important one to help me on my journey to unlocking emotions in the business world!
I very much look forward to opening many new discussions around emotions both face to face but also online. This is my second bonus! My beliefs were indeed holding me back from online facilitation; but I took the leap and it worked amazingly well. I am now ready to support teams around the world! This as such was one of my initial goals when I got into coaching. I wanted to be able to work internationally. Now this is happening. What is your unpredicted learning from the Covid-19 lockdown days?
Pilar Majerovic,
valueable team member and a business coach