Public Service Event: Engaging the Human Resource
Employee engagement: Something you do with your employees, not to them
We were invited to attend the Public Service Event “Engaging the Human Resource” yesterday. For me the highlight of the day was an inspiring story from Clive Bradley about his trip to the Gambian hospital of Bangtang, which he used brilliantly to illustrate the point that engagement isn’t something you do to your employees, but rather something that you do with them. We at Delta 7 whole-heartedly agree.
Clive and his colleague Michael Cosello delivered a much needed Land Rover to the hospital to help employees travel around the various clinics throughout the Gambia and interviewed the employees to find out what other things they most wanted at work. At this point the hospital had been losing good people to another better equipped Gambian hospital.
It turned out that what people most wanted were simple things like having some books for ward staff to read on the night shift when there wasn’t much going on. When the changes that the staff had requested were made, there were some startling and unexpected consequences. As well as improved staff retention, the infant mortality rates dropped by around a factor of 10.
Clive and Michael were summoned to the House of Commons to explain whether the dramatic reduction in infant mortality could be replicated elsewhere. But the point is that it’s clearly not the giving of books per se, for example, that helped reduce infant mortality. The link is clearly through improving the experience of being at work for those employees whose actions have an effect on infant mortality. Yet there was no one-size fits all engagement “solution” here that worked its magic. Instead, increased engagement, and the dramatic improvements in other areas that went with it, occurred as a result of consulting with employees to find out what they wanted and then acting on it.
