CRF Employee Engagement Conference 2010
I went to a great conference last week on employee engagement organised by the Corporate Research Forum. There were several good speakers, covering a range of interesting themes and plenty of time to explore them with participants around the table. This was something I greatly enjoyed as it was good to be at a conference on engagement and actually feel engaged!
One particular table exercise was to discuss “what HR can do to create employee engagement?”
A theme that came up on several tables was: ‘we need to see people as human beings who are valued and respected instead of a simple resource to be used up’.
That really got me thinking. So many people share that feeling of not being treated by their organisation as human beings – it’s an unspoken that lies just below the surface. I made this picture to capture both the intensity and simplicity of this issue.
Interestingly, the problem is clearly embedded there, in language, in the name of that most familiar of organisational job functions: ‘human resources’.
So what can HR do to make an organisation treat its people more like human beings and less like resources to be consumed?
What could I do today that would treat the people I work with more like human beings and less like raw resources to be used? What could I change personally?
At Delta7 we know that in order to treat other people with respect we have to first learn how to respect ourselves. What one thing could you do to treat yourself with more respect today?
We’d like to know how this picture makes you feel. Just post a comment (below)
Organisational charts and organisational reality
There’s something reassuring about org charts – they can easily disguise what is really going on, making everything feel neat and manageable.
It’s interesting how often the title of these charts is the name of the company, as if the piece of paper actually is the company itself.
Elephant Under The Table
When people become fearful of saying what really concerns them, leaders lose sight of what’s really happening in their organization and the quality of their decision-making suffers. For employees, unarticulated frustration can turn into confusion and anger that quickly creates a culture of low morale. This then manifests as apathy, resistance or even sabotage.
Soon, no one wants to talk about the real issues even though they are staring everyone in the face. These things are difficult to talk about and all too often at key briefings and presentations people just sit in silence, unable to say what they really think because it feels too risky to speak up.
What is the Elephant under your table?
We must capture their hearts and minds!
This is a picture of an exchange we heard a few years ago in a client session. It’s so rich we just had to make a picture out of it. It is can be easy for leaders to lose touch with the cares and concerns of the people that work for them. By not connecting with what matters to their people, they lose the sense of reality about what’s going on in the wider organisation.
In this picture, the leadership team, excited and motivated by their charts and strategic concerns in the comfort of the well-lit office contrast starkly with the demoralised employee dragging himself to work through the rain and cold.
This picture reminds us that the jargon of leadership, if used in the wrong context, can widen any gulf between leadership and the rest of the organisation.
The crisis in public spending
This picture reflects concerns we heard while working with a number of central government departments last year. Most of these organisations have experienced a steady increase in funding under Labour, but under the shadow of a dramatic economic downturn are having to adapt to a stark new reality.
The imminent future is one where social issues continue to rise, fed by increased debt and unemployment, while the pipeline of funding is abruptly turned off. While money could be used to disguise inadequacies in the past, this is no longer possible – public sector organisations are going to have to rely on their own “intangible” qualities to weather the storm.
A little thought from each of us…
Who is Transport for London speaking for – and to?
This is one of a series of posters around the Underground that have caught my eye over recent months.
It’s part of a Transport For London campaign called ‘Together For London’ aimed at reducing anti-social behaviours across London’s transport system. The message is ‘A little thought from each of us. A big difference for London’.
Rather strangely, a search of the TfL website for ‘Together For London’ gives only this. Stranger still, clicking the link on that page brings you to this page. No background, no depth, no accountability, no process and no names. Just those graphic outcomes.
So who is ‘Together For London’ speaking for? And who is it speaking to?
According to the website text, the images represent ‘key messages’ chosen by Londoners for the campaign to feature; a ‘pet-hate-list’ of antisocial behaviours endured by the long-suffering public. The list includes people playing loud music on their iPods, putting their feet on seats, hogging empty seats to stop other people sitting next to them, cyclists who don’t stop for red traffic signals and more. You get the idea.
This all leaves me wondering: if you’re consciously antisocial (eg. you know what you’re doing but don’t care) will this campaign cause you to change your behaviour? And if you’re unconsciously antisocial, will this campaign wake you up and then cause you to change your behaviour?
At Delta7, we believe that personal change requires a change in thinking and that this happens through dialogue with others. Pictures can be a powerful catalyst for those change conversations; but they don’t just make change happen. They act as a doorway to dialogue out of which shifts in understanding can occur and then new actions emerge. Where is the dialogue in TfL’s campaign? Where is the doorway?
The effectiveness of any behavioural change strategy can only be measured if the underlying assumptions about – or model of – change are surfaced so they can be tested and evidenced. The nature and placement of the pictures in this campaign seems to belie a change model that assumes that change will happen as a result of picturing or writing the change you want to see in a stand-alone poster.
Since I’m one of the ‘converted’ (I don’t do antisocial behaviour), I can’t comment on the effectiveness of this strategy. Only TfL or the perpetrators of antisocial beheviour themselves can tell us. For that we would need to hear from anyone whose behaviour had been shifted or changed by this campaign. I will be surprised if TfL ends up with that kind of data. Certainly nothing currently on their website suggests they will.
I suppose I could ask the next person I come across on the Tube with their feet on the seats or behaving offensively under the influence of alcohol whether these pictures will help them change their behaviour.
Somehow, though, I doubt I will. 
Congruence and leading change
How leadership incogruence obstructs change
After many years working with organisations in change, two things have become clear to me: first, that many leaders see change as something they have to get other people to do and second, that many employees think their leaders don’t ‘walk the talk’ or practice the behavioural changes they preach.
A typical change programme in today’s organisations may come packaged as ‘values-based behaviour change’ – with a call to put the company’s values into action in support of the strategic vision. ‘We need people to act this and that way for the organisation to be successful’ is the underlying ask from leadership.
The problem isn’t the business case for change since this is usually easy to understand e.g. ‘the environment has just got tougher and we need to do more with less’. The problem is a preference for avoiding the discomfort of looking at and considering changing our own behaviour. Unsurprisingly, many leaders prefer to support other people and groups to change rather than work on themselves; those other people, in turn, prefer to help other people change … and so on.
The cost of leaders not embodying the kinds of changes they ask of others is immense for two very simple and powerful reasons. The first is that when they avoid exploring the discomfort of change before asking others to, they miss the opportunity to equip themselves with the kind of skills, empathy and understanding that would be invaluable for supporting change in others. The second is that when they don’t work on their own behaviours, leaders lose the ability to lead by example and are perceived as incongruent.
This incongruence creates a lack of trust, diminishes respect and reduces the capacity to lead. Internally, it can be even worse: the secret knowledge that he/she cannot walk the talk can leave a leader with feelings of shame that erode their sense of self-worth.
What is engagement?
Engagement is Connection …
The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has just published a new report by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke on employee engagement. We wholeheartedly recommend this report – it makes some great points and is filled with useful case studies. It’s very hard to get to the end and still avoid the conclusion that having an engaged workforce really does improve bottom line results.
But what actually is engagement? Is it an attitude (e.g. pride, loyalty), a behaviour (going the extra mile) or an outcome (e.g. lower absenteeism)? The authors amassed over 50 definitions and share three, all of which are a bit woolly. Many of the contributors just said “you know it when you see it”. Here’s the definition they end up with for the report:
Engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.
This is probably a good summary of how the word is typically used in HR and internal communications departments. There are lots of things to say about it, but my underlying concern is this: It implies that engagement is something that is done to people. I want to suggest a different starting point.
The starting point is to notice that “engagement” is a metaphor. Historically the word means a connection – a coming together. You use a clutch to engage a gear, armies engage in battle, and of course people become engaged with other people when they buy their services, agree to marry them, or just make an appointment to see them. The extension of the word into emotional experience is just an extension of this sense of connection. If I have an engaging experience at the theatre or the cinema, it’s because I’m connecting with something – I care about what happens to the characters, or how the underlying themes are developed. The same sense is true of engaging books, engaging conversations, engaging stories and so on – they are all examples of connecting with things we find important.
If we take this sense of connection as the central meaning, we get a very clear and simple definition of workplace engagement: A felt connection between what is important to me as an employee and what is important to the organisation I work for. A voluntary staff member working for a charitable cause they passionately believe in will obviously be much more engaged with their work than a student working at McDonalds.
By simplifying the definition of engagement down to this level, we can create a clearer picture of what it looks like when people are feeling engaged:
A successful “engagement” intervention is anything that increases the size of the orange overlap in the centre of the diagram, the space in which leadership concerns and workforce concerns connect. Notice that whatever your role in your organisation – business partner, OD manager, senior leader – whenever you instigate some form of “engagement” activity – i.e. you create this central space – you are taking on the role of a leader. How engaged people will feel as a result correlates directly with the quality of this interaction: Its openness, honesty, integrity, clarity, vulnerability and so on.
The time cost of poor communication
What I learned about communication from commuting into London every day …
Two things I hate: Train delays and boring Powerpoint presentations. They both waste time, and not in an unrelated way, as I want to show.
The metaphor of time as a scarce resource is a well integrated part of the Western worldview – we don’t just talk about how we waste time, but how we save time, spend time, how time runs out, how some time can be set aside, how to invest time profitably and so on. In business, of course, buying and selling time is literally what happens whenever you employ someone. Your employees’ time becomes another scarce resource you use to realise the vision of the business.
By way of analogy, next time you’re on a busy platform waiting for a delayed train, notice how many other people there are. If there’s, say, sixty people on the platform and the train has a ten minute delay then that’s a total of ten hours worth of time that’s been wasted. If the same train calls at another ten stations to pick up a similar number of commuters, then you have three full weeks’ worth of working time taken out of the economy.
Here’s my point: What quantity is the driver of the train thinking of – the ten minutes or the three weeks? Next time you’re creating your Powerpoint deck, ask yourself the same question. What is the cost to the business of people not understanding what you’re saying? Of not seeing your strategy? Of not knowing how the business actually works? Of not having the same vocabulary? Clarifying exactly what you mean and figuring out how to express it in layman’s terms is obviously a good use of time. But somehow it often doesn’t feel like it when you’re already in a rush.
So next time you’re tempted just to cut and paste together bits and pieces from other presentations and wing it on the day, try to think not just in terms of the immediate time you’re saving as an individual, but the compound time of all the audience members you’ll be wasting.
Business stress: what’s not being talked about in your organisation?
How unspoken issues and feelings can be the biggest barrier to change and increase the stress in a business
I was working with a client last week at an away-day workshop, one session was about exploring the obstacles to change. Before we’d got very far, it became apparent to me that the biggest obstacles still weren’t being talked about. Having had some experience over the years of drawing out unspoken issues to help people talk about them, I challenged the participants: ‘What’s not being talked about here today?”
At first there was a stunned silence. Then someone put their hand up and almost in a whisper said “It’s that the competent people have the most work on dumped on them. Not only that, we don’t know what to do with the incompetent ones either”.
Within seconds, the room was buzzing with energy as people wanted to share their ‘unspokens’. Things like “I feel a slave”; “I feel powerless, overworked and unrewarded”. Then many small conversations broke out as everyone wanted add their own unspokens. I could sense in the participants a pent-up desire to talk about what was at the front of their minds; a need to express things they felt unable to voice at work.
In highly charged political work environments it can feel too risky, dangerous in fact, to speak up about what is felt to be most important. When people feel unable to speak honestly about the real issues, it can create the sort of frustration and confusion that soon leads to a culture of low morale, blame, distrust, resistance and ultimately sabotage.
I think this can be a big problem for leaders, as they often get shielded from the truth, so don’t get the honest feedback they need to lead effectively. If this gap of meaning between leader and staff isn’t bridged, it can spiral out into unproductive cycles of unreality and pretence. Eventually no one wants to talk about the real issues at meetings, even though they are staring everyone in the face. It is too dangerous to talk about them.
I often wonder about the financial cost of this fear-driven lack of honest conversation. If organisations need accurate feedback to function, then the lack of feedback surely has a huge financial cost. And we need to acknowledge that accurate feedback comprises two kinds of information: the rational and the emotional. Both are vital if people are to work together effectively. If the organisation doesn’t have a vocabulary to talk about how people feel, then the information it’s working with is incomplete; and that lack of information can have serious consequences.
What do you think?
I believe this is an extremely important issue – maybe the biggest challenge leaders face – if we agree that organisational development and business success are fundamentally based on improving the quality of working relationships. And we all know that the critical factor in improving relationships is finding better ways to create meaning through open and honest communication. To this end I will be organising a workshop to explore this issue in September 2009 – please get in touch for more details.
Comments please to: julian@delta7.com
