■ A fortnightly business advice column by Whakatāne accountant and business adviser Jason Lougher

We took family to Auckland a while back to see the Warriors play. It was my youngest’s first live sports event, and we kitted him out for it: new hat, a flag, big crowd, the lot.

Midway through the second half he had gone quiet, fidgeting, asking how long was left, the cardinal sin of any kid at a sporting event. I made the call most parents make eventually and we left before the end of the game. The good news is we beat the traffic. The bad news is we missed an amazing finish.

A week or so later we started talking about going back to Auckland for another Warriors game, and all of a sudden Ralph was keen, excited even.

I had my concerns, so we made a deal. He could come if he sat down, did the research, and presented to the family on what he had learned about rugby league.

Since then, something has shifted. He has been on the iPad, asking questions, getting answers, becoming hooked. It was not the game that hooked him. It was missing the game that hooked him.

I have been thinking about that since, because the same thing happens with staff in the businesses I work with. Plenty of owners assume their team will engage because they are paid to. Show up, do the work, care about the result. But it rarely happens that way on its own.

What does happen, surprisingly often, is that people engage when they realise they have been missing something. Missing the win, missing the close call, missing the month the numbers came in stronger than anyone expected, missing the customer feedback that lifted the room, missing the moment the boss landed the contract. When people understand what they have been left out of, they start showing up differently.

Which means there is something here worth thinking about. The wins, the close calls, the month-by-month scoreboard, the thank you that lands in your inbox.

If your team only ever sees the work, and never sees the result, they have no idea what they are part of.

The owners I talk to who have engaged teams almost always do one specific thing. They show people the scoreboard, not the bank account or the share price, but the things that mark real progress: did we land that quote, did we keep that customer, did we hit the month, did we hear back from the one we were worried about. It sounds simple, and it is, but most teams operate without ever seeing it.

You can run pep talks, put pizza on at lunch, put motivational posters in the lunchroom. None of that touches what FOMO (fear of missing out) touches. Once a person realises something good is happening that they could be part of, and they almost missed it, they start paying a different kind of attention. That is engagement. Not the noise of being told to care, but the quiet thrill of realising you nearly missed something worth caring about.

So, a small thought heading into a quieter stretch of the year. If you have got people on the books who feel checked out, the question is probably not how to motivate them, but what they are seeing of the business. Not the work, but the results: the wins, the scoreboard, the close calls. Then ask what they would think if they realised what they had been a few minutes from being part of and walked away from.

Now if you will excuse me, we have tickets to buy. Apparently we cannot miss this next game.

■ Jason Lougher is the owner of Calc Business Advisors & Chartered Accountants. Our team advise businesses throughout the Eastern Bay of Plenty — and across New Zealand. Like this article or want to chat? Feel free to send me an email: [email protected]