Feeling down...

Where I work we conduct regular research to find out how people are feeling and how ‘engaged’ they are. I recently got the results for my team. They were very disappointing. They’re still well above average for the company, but they have taken a dip compared to last year. The odd thing is there doesn’t seem to be any particular area which has declined. It’s just right across the board. So, I’ve been thinking about what to do.

Most of my team works remotely and flexibly. Sometimes it can be weeks before I see someone in person I work with regularly. Also, over the past year quite a few new people joined the team as part of a re-organisation. They also work remotely. So we’re now quite a big team, but we hardly ever see each other. When we were small, we all knew each other well and there was an intimate atmosphere. That intimacy sustained us when we were remote. I think over the past year we’ve lost that.

One of the things I’m going to do is encourage everyone to join up to Twitter – and have created a closed user group for that purpose. Although most of the team work in the technology space, we’re not all early adopters so it’ll be really interesting to see what happens. The danger is that a few take to the technology and get really well connected – better connected than now, but others don’t get on with it all and become even more remote from the group and end up being almost outsiders. I’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The other thing is to make sure that we use these social tools to facilitate face to face interactions, not replace them. I think that’s another key thing that has been missing over the past year.

I’ll let you know how it goes.