Pharmacy teams are an essential pillar of front line healthcare and are increasingly being recognised for the contribution they are making to influencing the health of their communities, but how do we ensure our teams are happy and engaged?
Team engagement can feel like a big undertaking in an already busy pharmacy environment but there are some simple, evidence based things you can do.
Gallup is a globally recognised organisation that focuses on team engagement and performance research and analytics. Gallup's most recent meta-analysis -- a study of many studies -- on team engagement and performance includes employee engagement statistics accumulated over the past three decades.
The study covered more than 112,000 teams -- over 2.7 million employees -- in 276 organisations across 54 industries and in 96 countries and showed there is a direct correlation between team engagement and performance outcomes.
Some key insights from the data include:
- Engagement is foundational for high performance and is the fuel for improving business results. Some of the key business metrics:
- 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.
- Team engagement isn’t something you can do on an ad-hoc basis - effective, simple, actionable and consistent approaches makes the biggest difference.
- Ensure you measure what matters
Here are 4 quick ways to start focusing on building team engagement:
1. REFLECT – how often do you check in with your team members? Specifically what questions do you ask and what actions do you take based on their answer. Can you notice any themes about the way you are engaging with them? Eg are you aware of their life outside of work, are your conversations often about tasks only, do you focus on your teams psychological needs and their overall health and wellbeing?
2. STOP - James Clear, author of Atomic Habits says “Improvement is often not about doing more things right, but more about doing less things wrong”. Could you list 2 things you would like to stop doing that could be impacting team engagement.
3. ASSESS – Wherever you sit along the spectrum of team engagement, brining awareness to this area and considering what small improvements you can make over time will influence your team overall. When you think about team engagement in your pharmacy do you:
a. Feel overwhelmed and not sure where to start
b. Understand that this is a priority but can’t find the time
c. Have your own approaches to team engagement but haven’t
really measured the impact
All change start with awareness. So this tiny assessment is a good start.
4. ACT – what are 3 actions you can take in the next 30 days to start to focus more on making team engagement part of your everyday. The smaller the action the more likely you will be to achieve it.
Remember, happy and engaged teams can be built and it’s often less about finding lots of time and more about knowing where to focus the small time you do have, so that you can be effective at delivering optimal pharmacy care and engaging your teams, at the same time.
PS. If you’d like to find out more from the Gallup Report click here
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