Employee Engagement Beyond the Workplace
My most recent long term client contract had me specialise in Employee Engagement, something I’d done consistently at the Senior and Middle Managers level. But this client need was across the board and at a time when major changes were occuring.
With a previous survey of their staff in two states and across three sites suggesting a majority of their staff were feeling less than appreciated I started right at the base level of engagement – I wandered around and talked to people.
And I listened a lot. And when seemingly straight forward fixes to ‘pesky problems’ were identified, I had the authority to fix them and if I couldn’t initiate a fix I explained why not and what the next steps were most likely to be. And I helped fix lots if little things that can be hard to measure because there’s no one ‘big project’ to point to. Working one on one and having what often became very personal conversations doesn’t show up on your KPI list but it matters at a level that sadly, too many HR and senior managers ignore – authenticity
The listening and acting quickly built trust and so when it came time to tackle larger team based issues we had a basis to work from. The results saw a shift from ‘mostly not happy’ to ‘mostly happy’ (different labels across about five metrics being summarised) and all of that at a time when the company was going through the largest growth phase of its 40 year existence, opening a fourth factory location and experiencing an increase of about 25% in overall employee numbers.
But for some employees the overriding sense was ‘there needs to be more to this than just work’ and overwhelmingly these were the younger team members and managers. They needed the bigger project, collectively designed and run and that saw a series of new initiatives emerging. This report picks up so much of what I’d experienced and is highly recommended reading – Understanding How to Engage Millennials
The MP3 file below captures part two of our chat looking at the Future of Sex. Picking up on the theme of new technology that popped up towards the end of our first discussion in week one, here we move onto haptics and holographics and the extension of that technology from beyond the bedroom and…
Read More >Who’s Been Sleeping In My House? is a new Australian series presented by archaeologist Adam Ford that looks at the stories behind some of our old homes. Adam is the man behind the recent ‘Ned Kelly’ dig among other great archaeology finds here in Australia and the UK. As a futurist I’m always interested in…
Read More >The Association of Professional Futures is holding its first Virtual Gathering, following the sun from Europe, across North America and finishing in the Australia pacific zone. It kicks off tomorrow and links to the program and registration (it’s only $45 for guests for a program featuring some of the worlds most prominent futurists) You…
Read More >I join Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Darwin radio where we continue our discussion about the future of sex. We consider three main areas in this session – smart phone applications; remote relationships and the combination of haptics and holographics as one the emerging means by which we’ll maintain physical contact. You can download the…
Read More >In this chat with Vicki Kerrigan on radio ABC Darwin we discuss the future of sex. This is the first of potentially three conversations where we look at the increasing reach of technology way beyond current online match making sites, the social pressures driving the use of technology as well as the use of technology…
Read More >There’s been a bit of discussion in recent months about a softening housing market around Australia but I wonder how much of it is more indicative of unrealistic expectations on behalf of sellers? In futures work we think in terms of Assumptions and Expectations and aim to test our understanding and so I offer this…
Read More >Unfortunately it looks like my main email address has been hijacked and has been used to send out a series of spam emails. I’d like to apologise to anyone who has received some junk email purporting to come from ‘desiredfutures’ with a series of html links asking you to go and have a look. You…
Read More >Given the amount of plastic swimming in our oceans and rivers and the volume littering our land, the NT Government is aiming to introduce compulsory returns legislation on soft-drink bottles (as happens in South Australia), something that has apparently raised the ire of bottler, Coca Cola. Although they’ve recently backed away from their initial statement…
Read More >Deciphering the hype from reality with regard to drug use can be a challenge for most of us. Professor David Nutt in the UK has given me permission to post a link to the paper he has co-authored with Ruth Weissenborn that looks at the reality of a comparison of harm caused by two common…
Read More >Vicki Kerrigan and I finished off our discussion about the Future of Clothing on ABC Darwin yesterday. We discussed invisibility style cloaks, singlets that monitor your heart rate and stress levels, runners that capture electricity to power your wearable electronics and a few philosophical questions regarding our ability to deal with stress. The file…
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