Three ways to keep staff engaged at work

Two vans pull over on a grassy hilltop. Inside sit a dozen meteorology students and their professor.

From here, you can see in all directions because we are in the Great Plains of North Dakota.

You can also hear the rumbling from a thunderstorm overhead. This is what they have come to see as the local college had organised a storm-chasing field trip.

The students had been waiting for this moment since their professor told them that this would likely be “the storm of the year”. The forecast predicted it could even produce an “earth-grinding tornado”.

So we are surprised to see the students hardly paying attention when the professor reports that the storm is producing hail the size of grapefruit.

Instead, they seem tired and inattentive - one is even drifting into sleep.

Why employee engagement matters

As management scholars would put it, the team is suffering from low engagement.

In this context engagement is the degree to which we are cognitively, emotionally, and physically immersed in our tasks.

The problem is not that these students lack passion. Rather, they spent all week focusing narrowly on a tornado scenario that is now failing to happen.

Understanding how people engage with work in uncertain settings is what we are here to study as management professors.

Engagement is an essential part of performance in organisations, where the work is complex, fast-paced, and requires creativity.

What storm chasers can teach more conventional businesses

It might seem surprising to find business school academics embedded with storm chasers. However, it represents the management field’s growing interest in what are called extreme contexts.

The idea is that unconventional settings have a lot to teach those of us in more familiar workplaces. This is especially true where the organisations have adapted to extreme conditions.

To learn about safety and reliability, you might study nuclear power plants where mistakes have dire consequences.

For lessons about improvisation, look at police tactical units or mountaineers whose lives depend on it.

And to understand how people engage with work under uncertainty, we looked to storm chasing. Over three years, we accompanied the chasers through both the exciting and mundane moments.

Boredom and disappointment at work

Storm chasing involves the pursuit of severe weather. Chasers who have encountered a powerful tornado will attest to the exhilarating, even spiritual nature of the experience.

It might seem like highly engaging work for scientists, tour operators, and those who make a living from selling their footage. Yet the opposite is often true.

As one of us had previous experience of storm chasing, we were aware that it frequently involves boredom and disappointment.

Teams spend their days preparing for dramatic encounters with severe weather that mostly fails to live up to expectations.

You might not think storm chasing is similar to your work. However, our research identified valuable lessons about how people can stay engaged and enthused about their job.

How uncertain work demands can affect employees

Work engagement is associated with valuable outcomes for people and their organisations. This includes an increase in creative output, commitment and a sense of wellbeing.

Yet many people struggle to stay engaged, feeling distracted or de-energised. This is partly attributable to the lack of meaningful work in many modern jobs.

However, our research highlights another reason. Many of us are enthusiastic about our work, yet find only fleeting opportunities to engage with our core tasks.

Consider the firefighter who signs up to rescue people from blazes, only to spend their days attending false alarms. Or the news correspondent who arrives on the scene to report an important story but finds nothing much happening.

Such unpredictable and intermittent work demands wear down people’s enthusiasm.

We spend more time at our workplaces. Yet many of us report that we do not get enough time to engage with important or desirable tasks.

This has been shown to lead to a lack of productivity, accidents and even a loss of professional identity.

Three steps to more engaged employees

The good news is that our research shows that many storm chasers have learned to stay engaged with their work. They manage this even in the slowest periods where nothing exciting appears to be happening.

The trick is that these chasers do not just wait for events like tornadoes to happen. Instead, they transform the present moment into an opportunity to engage with meaningful tasks.

1 A broader definition of meaningful tasks

First, chasers broaden what they consider to be meaningful tasks. For example, they may cultivate an appreciation for commoner, more predictable weather scenarios. As one tour operator told us: “We tell clients … we regularly see supercells … [which] can be more beautiful and photogenic than tornadoes.”

The lesson for managers is to broaden employees’ appreciation for the range of everyday work situations, not just the extraordinary cases.

This is particularly important for managers in business and professional organisations that face uncertain work demands.

The reality is that employees spend much of their time dealing with routine tasks. Salespeople have meetings with smaller clients, healthcare workers see patients with common ailments, and engineers contribute to less visible projects.

Employees may especially feel let down when they see colleagues working on bigger projects. This can sap motivation and ultimately the quality of their work.

You can avoid this disappointment and encourage employees to fully immerse themselves in their work by setting realistic expectations. Another approach is highlighting the inherent worth of their work, even in ordinary situations.

2 Fill downtime with enriching activites

Second, chasers enrich their downtime by filling it with activities that let them feel the day has been spent productively, even if no storms occurred. They may test a new forecasting technique, for example.

When downtime goes on for too long it leaves employees feeling unproductive and under-utilised. They may even feel adrift in time and stressed about their lack of performance.

Take, for example, a consultant awaiting client work or a software developer who has not yet been assigned to a project.

What managers can do here is to focus employees’ attention on things they can control.

Managers can encourage employees to develop their professional skills for future projects, provide support to attend a conference, or arrange access for them to build connections with other departments in the organisation.

By giving employees something useful to do at their own discretion, managers can get employees’ minds off waiting. Instead, they feel they are using their time productively in ways that also contribute to broader organisational goals.

3 Extend core tasks and desirable jobs

Third, chasers extend the duration of their core tasks. As one team leader explained, the time spent preparing and debriefing can be “more important [in keeping members enthused] than the five minutes you get with the tornado after eight hours of driving”.

In most workplaces, there is an understandable desire to use time efficiently.

However, stretching out the extraordinary tasks that energise employees can improve their sense of feeling engaged at work.

Events such as product launches or meetings with important clients may be brief. However, the days of preparation and debriefing allow time for energy to build among colleagues as they work together.

Managers can magnify this excitement by showing how administrative tasks tie into the success of the larger project.

The key to improved job satisfaction and productivity

Bosses can even create new tasks that let employees relive the exciting moments. For example, have them share their learnings to other units in the organisation.

Stretching out extraordinary events helps employees to form memories that can keep them feeling enthusiastic about their work.

Our research shows that we can be more engaged at work when we appreciate the broader range of tasks that come our way, enrich idle periods with meaningful activities, and stretch out the energising moments we encounter.

By applying these lessons, leaders can prevent their team becoming becalmed between flurries of intense activity. This can help to improve productivity and employee satisfaction, creating a brighter outlook for the organisation.

This Core Insights article is adapted from a piece originally published by The Conversation.

Further reading:

How to build and manage a hybrid team

Six leadership skills you need to make the most of AI

The 10 questions successful leaders ask to spot a scandal before it happens

Chasing storms: Temporal work to foster group engagement under uncertainty

Derin Kent is Associate Professor of Organisation Studies at Warwick Business School. He teaches Leading and Managing on the Executive MBA and the Global Online MBA.

Nina Granqvist is Professor of Management Studies at Aalto University.

Learn more about the art of leadership on the four-day Executive Education course Leading an Agile and Resilient Organisation at WBS London at The Shard.

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