Engagement Activities

Engagement has a significant impact on teamwork, listening, attentiveness, and trust. It can lead to positive outcomes but also disrupt communication. Practicing being attentive and putting away distractions like phones can greatly improve engagement. One company even had their leaders turn off their monitors and flip their phones over to show they were ready and fully attentive. This built trust and helped both parties stay engaged. Facilitating activities like case studies and problem-solving can also help improve engagement by asking participants about their attention levels and strategies for staying focused. The goal is to facilitate improvement, not to correct engagement. You know, it's a corny activity, but when you think about engagement, engagement really affects a lot of things, teamwork, listening, attentiveness, trust. Engagement really drives a lot of positive things and it can cause a lot of disruptive things. Again, going back to the quick analogy, the minute you're talking to somebody and you peek at your phone and they see you peek at the phone and you go, I'm sorry, what did you say, they don't assume you had a fleeting moment. They tend to assume you weren't listening the whole time, whether fair or unfair. So one of the greatest things you can do is to have activities of practicing, being attentive, practice putting your phone away. And one of the greatest things I've heard was a company that did this where they actually practiced, played with their leaders, turning their monitor off and turning off their phone and flipping their phone over to start every conversation. The design of it was to show the person being coached, I'm ready, I'm listening, you've got my full attention. It built trust tremendously, yet it also conditioned the person coaching to truly be engaged and attentive. Practice those type of conversations, facilitate situations of maybe case studies and problem solving and ask people afterwards, after you actually facilitated some type of activity, pair them up in groups of two and then ask them, how many of you felt like your mind was wandering? What did you do to remind yourself to be attentive? How many of you found it difficult? Now you're not trying to correct engagement, you're trying to facilitate the improvement in engagement.