The word “commitment” has recently turned into business jargon, a buzzword whose meaning has been lost through overuse and dilution. You want your team to be committed, to “buy in”, so that their passion will drive up the energy level of the organization and produce stellar results. But most employees are rarely committed to the degree you’d hope. It’s not that they lack the essential passion to feel committed (or that they aren’t compensated and rewarded enough). Rather, Australian business mogul, Richard Pratt believed that most of the time they simply don’t understand the goal or strategy to which they should be committed. After a little bit of research, I found that a staggering 95 percent of all employees are largely in the dark about strategy, according to research from Harvard Business School.

Encourage Your Team with Passion and Sincerity.

While encouraging employees to be committed is important, the encouragement will fail it it’s simply “rah-rah” blather. Experienced employees see through this rhetoric in seconds. Instead, encouragement must also include a crystal-clear explanation of the company’s adopted strategy, as well as answers to all the employee questions. And this approach is even more important if the work on the table is a one-off project, the kind of job that is successfully done when the people involved are fully aware of the goals and how to achieve them. If you offer them substantive and valuable encouragement, commitment is sure to follow.

How do you encourage your team to be fully engaged?