UpTrajectory Review

Susan Thompson's piece in Small Business Trends lays out five tactics for lifting engagement on small teams: open-door communication, peer recognition, tailored development, flexible work arrangements, and regular tracking of engagement metrics. The framing leans on familiar engagement statistics—21% global engagement, 17% higher productivity, 41% lower absenteeism—to make the case that this is not soft HR talk but a performance lever. The article is a listicle at heart, but it gestures at something real: on a small team, disengagement is not an abstraction you read about in a Gallup report. It is visible in the Tuesday morning standup when two of your six people have already checked out mentally.

For a small-business operator, the stakes here are sharper than the article lets on. When you have eight or fifteen employees, one disengaged person is not a rounding error—it is a tenth of your workforce, and their drag on morale is public and contagious. The piece's emphasis on open-door policies and peer recognition is directionally right, but it undersells the operational reality: on a small team, the owner is the culture. There is no HR layer to buffer bad management. If you do not acknowledge contributions, nobody does. If you do not model boundaries around work-life balance, nobody takes them.

What is genuinely useful here is the insistence on tracking engagement metrics, which most small operators skip entirely because it feels corporate. The article's claim that critical messages should reach at least 70% of employees is oddly specific and worth questioning—engagement is not a communications reach problem—but the underlying instinct is sound. You cannot fix what you do not measure, and most small-business owners rely on gut feel, which tends to confuse quiet compliance with actual engagement until the resignation email lands.

Where we are skeptical is the article's breezy confidence that these five steps 'can transform your workplace.' Recognition programs and flexible arrangements are table stakes, not transformations. The harder problem the piece does not address is that engagement on a small team often collapses not because of missing perks but because of unclear roles, stagnant wages, or a founder who treats every feedback session as a performance review in disguise. An open-door policy does nothing if walking through it feels risky.

Our advice: start with the listening, not the program. Before you build a recognition framework or buy a survey tool, have three honest one-on-one conversations this month and ask a single question—what would make this job better for you? Then act on at least one thing you hear and say out loud that you did it. That loop, repeated, outperforms any structured program. Watch whether your best people start taking initiative again; that is the only engagement metric that matters at your scale.

“With only 21% of employees worldwide engaged, implementing effective employee engagement strategies can greatly improve productivity and profitability.” — Small Business Trends

Takeaway: On a small team, engagement lives or dies with the owner's daily behavior—start by listening, act on what you hear, and skip the corporate playbook.