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YOUR JOURNEY: ACCOUNT OWNER!
First of all, welcome! You’re here… you made it. We think that’s awesome, and we’re so glad to see you.
Whether you’re the leader of the group or the owner of the company, you must be important… after all, you’re the account owner! That means somehow you’re in charge of this expedition!
You have responsibilities and oversight over the team’s mission and your collective journey.
We want you to know that you’re not alone. We’re excited to partner with you in this responsibility. We care about your journey, and we care about your people.
Together you’re doing important and valuable work, and that kind of work is always hard.
It’s especially difficult when doing that work involves other people. And the more people that are involved, the harder it is!
People are complex, and there’s a lot that goes into their ability to be engaged, productive and high-performing.
To get where you want to go and achieve what you’re capable of achieving, you need them to be engaged and high performing. That’s what we’re here to help with.
Now you probably have a bunch of questions.
We’ve prepared this page to answer some of the most common questions. But if you don’t find your answers here, let us know by going to the Support page. Otherwise, let’s get going!
getting your team on board!
GETTING YOUR TEAM ON BOARD
IDENTIFYING WHO GETS ACCESS
The "Everyone" Approach
One of the first things we want to do is get your team into their accounts and engaged in this journey with you.
Of course we think the best way to do this is to give everybody access. That way nobody feels left out, everybody’s journey is given equal importance, and you have the ability to generate reports across the broadest employee set as possible. There’s a lot of value in that.
The more team members you have using the assessments, the more data you have access to. The more data you have access to, the more insights you’ll be able to get.
You’ll be able to segment that data and generate reports across teams, departments, locations, tenure, and other aspects you decide to track, which will give you the insights you need to optimize the journey.
The "Staged Rollout" Approach
If you’re more of a staged-rollout type, we get it. If that’s the case, then you may be wondering what teams to onboard first.
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind.
Often leaders prioritize the most dysfunctional teams, or those that are really struggling. This makes sense: if you’re wanting to see how engaged your people are and what is driving any disengagement, you clearly are going to want to get data on those teams right away.
The only consideration with that is you’re rolling out an engagement solution to a group of people that may be highly suspicious of your intent.
Perhaps they’re dealing with a toxic team culture. Or maybe there’s pervasive distrust on the team. Or perhaps their level of disengagement is so high to begin with, they aren’t going to take any of this seriously.
In that case, the data you get back will be tainted. You still want to get that data, because any metric you can get is a good starting point.
It gives you a baseline that you can act on, then you can measure again to see if there’s any improvement.
We have more help for the “struggling team” rollout scenario in the Internal Communications section from your Command Center.
While you may find some value with the “struggling team” approach, another potential problem is that your measure of “Value”—one of the 16 Elements that answers the question “is this worth it”—of your Investment (another Element) is going to be tainted. It may prevent you from rolling it out to the teams that are actually most likely to use it, benefit from it and find value in it.
Our Recommendation
While our clear first choice is “give it to everybody,” if you’re doing a staged rollout, we recommend diversifying your rollout strategy.
If you’re giving it to a team you suspect is struggling, roll it out also to a team that is equally on the other side of the engagement spectrum and to one that you feel to be somewhere in the “engagement neutral” zone.
The value of this approach is that you’ll have a second data point that will allow you to compare and contrast. Perhaps you’ll see that it isn’t as bad as you thought. Or perhaps you’ll find that it’s worse. Either way, whenever you’re dealing with data on people, it’s valuable to have diversification like this so you can compare and contrast.
The teams you choose don’t need to be big, but each team should be over three people.
This three-pronged rollout strategy can continue as you work to get all of your team members on board.
That will help generate the most useful data on your mission to increase engagement to drive performance and satisfaction.
Remember, if at any time you need help, or you have a team that you’re particularly worried about, our consultants are experts on this, and are happy to work with you more closely.
GETTING YOUR TEAM ON BOARD
internal communications
Once you’ve decided who to give accounts to, and before you set up their accounts, we recommend communicating to them beforehand what you’re about to give them.
It’s a big deal, after all, that you’re providing this resource for them.
In order for you to get the value from this that you deserve, it’s important for them to see its value so they actually use it!
How often have you done things for your team that they just don’t appreciate or end up using?
But also, whenever a leader rolls out an “assessment” solution, there will simply be some team members who are skeptical.
How you position the rollout is critical to a successful rollout and this journey to engagement we are on together.
For this reason, we’ve provided a whole section on internal communications that you can use to make sure your team knows what they’re about to get, why it’s so valuable, and why you care so much!
Just head over to the Internal Communications page from your Command Center (or click here) to find out more.
There, you’ll not only find guidance on internal positioning, but helpful information on dealing with different internal attitudes and toxic teams. You’ll also discover helpful email templates you can use for your rollout!
GETTING YOUR TEAM ON BOARD
creating accounts
Ok, so you’ve decided who is going to get an account and communicated to them that they’re the chosen ones. Now it’s time to actually give them access… how exciting!
If you’ve purchased our Professional Onboarding Package, you’ll want to visit the Pro-Onboarding page from your Command Center (or just click here).
Or maybe you’re the do-it-yourself type. You like the control and flexibility. We get it.
If that’s you, and you just want to start setting up your team (because it’s so easy, why wait?), simply visit the Manage Accounts link from your Command Center.
That will take you to the main My Account page, where you can manage all of your personal settings and information, company settings and information, as well as add users and manage existing users.
Further helpful guidance will be provided on that page to walk you through that process.
It’s also important to note that no matter how many accounts you purchased at the beginning, you can always go in and add more accounts. Your billing will simply reflect the number of accounts you have added.
And remember, if you ever need help, we’re here for you.
launching your first assessment
You’re probably chomping at the bit to get some data, right? We’re excited for that too, because that’s when the value of what you’ve invested in really comes alive!
The sooner you begin to gather data, the better. Gathering data early lets you get results fast, so you can begin working with teams and team leaders on the specific things the report identifies that need to be worked on.
And on top of that, the sooner you’ll be able to run your second, follow-up engagement report, where you can track the impact of your efforts to solve for engagement across your teams.
so let's get started
Every membership comes with the ability to take as many engagement assessments as they want, at any time, and for any aspect of life!
That’s right, the engagement assessment was carefully and lovingly crafted by our science team to be able to measure engagement across Critical Contexts.
Critical Contexts are those aspects of your life that you care enough about to be deliberate about—that are important enough that you should measure and manage.
That means you and your team can measure engagement for any and all aspects of your life (or “Critical Contexts”).
With every membership, there are some default Critical Contexts. These include Mind, Body, Spirit and Work.
Any member can change any of those (and create others), except the “Work” context. That one will always be there, because you have a team account. The “Work” context is the only one that will roll up into team reports.
encourage personal assessments
It’s good to encourage your team members to try the assessment for other Critical Contexts as an investment into their own personal development.
This will help them come to trust the assessment, and will help them begin to view it more as a personal tool to optimize the aspects of their life that really matter, and less as merely an organizational metric.
"launching" an assessment
What this means, of course, is that there’s nothing really that you have to do to “launch an assessment.” Those assessments are always available.
Instead, what you can do is send an internal email letting your team know that you’d like them to take their monthly or quarterly (or whatever you choose) assessment.
To make that easy, we’ve provided an email template in the Internal Communications section of your Command Center.
That email links to their assessment, so that your team can simply click the link to access and take the assessment from the email.
reports
sharing reports
The results of every individual assessment are available to the individual immediately after taking the assessment.
Those results can also easily be shared. We built the results so that you can simply copy the URL to your specific results page and can send it to anyone, giving them access to your full report details.
This is valuable for a few specific circumstances.
First, if you or one of your team members has a coach, a mentor, or a therapist, the results of the assessment can be shared in full, allowing for a more complete data set on how to provide help.
It’s also valuable when a leader and a team member have a good relationship, and the team member doesn’t mind sharing their full, un-anonymized results.
If the team member wants, they can share those results with a team leader so that they can have a deeper, more detailed look at engagement. Both team member and team leader will better see what the team leader can do to support that team member in creating the most engaging environment possible.
running team reports
Aside from an individual sharing their reports directly, anyone who has a Leadership License has the ability to run team reports.
Simply go to the “Tools & Assessments” page from the Command Center, and click on “Team Reports.”
From there, you can view all members of the organization who have taken the assessment. You can select which members you would like to run an aggregate report for, and see the results of that team.
When you go to run team reports, you’ll draw from the most recent results from whichever team members you are looking at (their last assessment date is shown, so you’ll know if it’s been a while).
If you see that some of them have not taken it recently, it’s a good idea to send a reminder to them. Watch for when they’ve taken it, so you can always pull the latest data when running a report.
You’ll also notice that there are profile fields associated with each team member, including department, division, location, team and tenure. You can use these fields to run aggregate reports.
It could be that your team doesn’t need all of those profile fields, in which case you can use them to track some other group or segment you’d like to track data for!
If you have additional segments you’d like to track, please feel free to reach out to us. We offer custom fields as an additional service if that is valuable to you.
custom fields
There are many creative and valuable ways to use custom profile fields for your engagement reports. One of the uses of Custom Fields is to track engagement by initiative.
You would just add a profile field for each initiative, and then make sure every employee is appropriately identified by the initiatives they play a significant role in.
This will allow you to track engagement, and even probability of success, by initiative and over time. It can be an incredibly powerful way to identify where your internal investments are needed and what you can do to increase Success Probability for the initiatives that matter most. You’ll also see which ones are at greatest risk!
how often should I do assessments?
There are a few important things to note when choosing how often to do assessments. The first is that it is always valuable to have lots of data—to measure often, so you can respond quickly.
The second is that if you measure too frequently, team members can experience survey fatigue, and that can show up in the form of bad data (especially if they’re just clicking through to get it done, and not taking it seriously).
Remember that they can take assessments as often and whenever they’d like. But in terms of how frequently you should actually request that they update their Work assessment, we recommend the following:
Not more than once a month.
While some go-getters will actually find high value from conducting their own assessment as often as weekly, most of the team will likely find more than once a month feels excessive.
Not less than once per quarter.
When it comes to engagement, a lot can change in a month, let alone three. Things may be happening in their personal life, with the people they work with, the environment they work in, the nature of the work they’re doing, the shifting of responsibilities of the work they do, or even the projects they’re assigned.
All of these, and a great many more, can heavily impact a team member’s engagement.
If you wait more than three months between measurements, you may miss some big things happening and not be able to respond in a timely manner.
During that much time, a team member can drift into very distant orbits of disengagement, where they even become toxic to the team or organization. A lot of damage can be done in that time.
The farther into disengagement someone drifts, the harder it can be to get them back, the likelihood of getting them back goes down, and the cost or difficulty of getting them back goes up.
On top of that, there could be additional damage done… like cultural damage, or even damage to the customer. At a minimum, it’s a period of time of reduced performance and productivity and a higher risk of churn.
our recommendation
We generally recommend you invite team members to update their Work Engagement Assessments either monthly, every other month, or every quarter.
We recommend you look at the frequency at which things change for a given team.
If things are changing fast, you’ll want to increase the frequency. If things don’t tend to change very fast, choose a less-frequent option.
Remember also that not every team has to be the same.
Some team members, locations, departments, or roles can be fine with a particular engagement cadence, while other roles require something unique to them.
The way our Engagement Assessments are set up allow you to really be the one to decide what cadence is right for each of your teams.
If you’d like further help, training, or advice on this, don’t hesitate to reach out to us for consulting. We can take a look with you at your specific scenario and recommend a cadence that is optimized for you.