Knowledge Base · Engagement
How do I get my team engaged in improvement?
Engagement grows when improvement feels like something people want to join, not a mandate they have to endure. Build trust through shared experiences, make it easy to offer ideas, involve people in solving real problems, teach together, and recognise progress in public. Fun, camaraderie and celebration are not extras in the book's account. They are fuel for the work.
The book opens this chapter with a stalled Six Sigma team at a large Fortune 100 insurance company. The team was talented and dedicated, but exhausted, and the energy in the room was gone. The leader scrapped the planned agenda and ran a simple collaborative problem-solving game for an hour. The laughter came back, and the team then broke through a problem that had stumped it for days.
The lesson is not that games fix everything. It is that people need to feel safe enough to share ideas, challenge how things are done, and admit when they do not have the answers. That safety is built through shared experiences, and through work people can see a point to.
- Build trust first: shared activities, from escape rooms to team trivia, break down silos and remind people they are on the same team.
- Give ideas an easy route in: an Idea Box, a Kaizen event, or a one-hour mini-Kaizen on one small problem.
- Keep learning together: lunch-and-learns and team book clubs give people new language for improvement.
- Recognise effort promptly and in public, so contributing feels noticed rather than expected.
Start small. Schedule a 30-minute reset this week, or pick one nagging workflow problem and work on it together for an hour. Engagement follows involvement, not announcements.
Related questions
- How do I turn employee ideas into real impact?
- How do I recognise and thank people for improvement ideas?
- How do I create a culture where people speak up about problems?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 10 (Engaging Activities for CI).