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
Futurist Marcus Barber will be joining ABC’s Vicki Kerrigan in Darwin for the first of an ongoing discussion about the future this Wednesday. Each week on Wednesday afternoon’s, Vicki and Marcus will discuss the future of something, how we prepare for the future, what the future looks like for some industries and other related futures…
Read More >The panel session at the National Manufacturing Week 2011 went well though with four of us on the panel, time was quite compressed. Some really good thoughts from Phillip Chindamo from AIG, Damon Cantwell from Deloitte and Erol Harvey from Minifab, delightfully chaired by Sandra George from SEBN at the City of Greater Dandenong. Rather…
Read More >On Thursday I’ll be part of the panel that wraps up the National Manufacturing Week 2011 in Melbourne at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre under the theme of Meeting the challenges of the next generation of manufacturing with a focus on Innovation and Sustainability. It should be an interesting chat as we consider what…
Read More >There’s lots to like about borrowing ideas from other areas especially where those ideas can lead to a significant positive shift. In the link below, Zaid Ali Alsagoff an educational blogging specialist highlights why the Finnish Education system stands as a potential model to embrace. And whilst there are examples of this type of thinking…
Read More >Environmental Scanning (ES) is the process of paying attention to the world in which you operate in order to identify and gain a sense of potential signals of change in how your world is developing. When discussing the idea of ‘change’ we need to be clear – a potential signal of change is likely to…
Read More >When it comes to water management, there’s something of potential value that Victoria could learn from Western Australia’s weather given discussions about new dams If you have almost 60 days straight of above 30 degree days with pretty much no rain, how do you fill the dam? Well you don’t but you’ve put all of…
Read More >The natural disasters we’ve seen recently around the world have shown us much about the communities in which they’ve occurred. The images emerging from Japan, New Zealand and Australia as they’ve faced earthquakes, tsumanis, floods and fires stands on stark contrast to the mainstream media stories that suggests people of the world are not willing…
Read More >Hi everyone – a quick note to let you know that our phones lines have been down for a while now and we are working on getting them fixed. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you. In the meantime, try using either our 1800 number where you can leave a message only…
Read More >ABC journalist Adam Stephen interviews Marcus Barber on the subject of GM foods and whether they might be more widely embraced as part of the global food requirements The interview (about 3& 1/2 mins) is available in MP3 format here and a link to the shorter web article is here. Some key points –…
Read More >South East Business Networks, the City of Greater Dandenong’s longest running business development program, is an exceptional avenue for learning about issues to do with Manufacturing. This week they provided one ‘out of the box’ with an excellent presentation by Professor Goran Roos, a worldclass expert on Manufacturing and currently South Australia’s Thinker in Residence.…
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