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