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
I was doing it well before then and there’s clips of me online going back as far as 2010 or so, railing against the idea of human resources as a label and the insistence by HR managers or CEOs that only people who work ‘in the office’ are going to be productive. It Is A…
Read More >Like lab grown meats, Vertical Farming is going to be part of the future of food. For now it might be best to compare them to small scale battery storage on the electrical grid that can help balance out spikes of demand in the system and provide an output directly where needed. Eventually (like…
Read More >In rental and lease markets it’s fair to say that for the best part of three decades, the landlords have been the price setters. The rules around negative gearing in domestic supply enable sizeable portfolios. Demand in office spaces in central suburbs has been consistently tight. And now, finally, CFO’s have become aware of the…
Read More >With Australia having just about wrestled Covid19 to the ground (NSW remains a bit of an issue) there’s now surging demand for PPE in the USA. The Covid19 virus is tracking toward an exponential increase and PPE Manufacturers should start looking for supply opportunities Sadly in the USA over the past week, they are adding…
Read More >The Mechanical, Psychological, and Biological Interventions of a Pandemic With Johnson and Johnson also pausing it’s #Covid19 #vaccine trial, it is becoming clearer to more of the public, that the long steady path to a vaccine is not something that can be rushed for anyone’s political agenda or preferred view of the world. We’re learning…
Read More >It seems that one way or another, Victoria is going to pop out of #Lockdown. Probably not in the way we would have hoped. And so for everyone pushing for #AfterLockdown in Victoria and for the wider society, there are two questions you must confront: One – ‘What do you feel is an acceptable level…
Read More >No, it’s not easy. Most of the challenges come down to our expectations – are they valid based on the assumptions you have made about your future? Those assumptions are based on the information you have available to you. We gather information, make an assessment of meaning, which leads us to make assumptions for an…
Read More >A thought on the ‘Why should I be in lock-down in my suburb, it’s not fair that we have to do it and no one else has to, my hair’s a mess I need to sell coffees and pizza’ crowd – an explanation you might appreciate You’ve been asked to go back into lock-down…
Read More >Visions are forward looking statement, but good ones, REALLY good ones have key elements 1. They are things you want but do NOT have 2. Are as long or as short as they need to be 3. Are by the people they are for 4. Are for the people they are by 5.Offer stability in…
Read More >If there’s one thing that the #CaronaVirus has shown us loud and clear it is that we are reliant on the people AT THE CONTACT FACE to carry us through. For Individuals, it is those in Healthcare we rely on. For Populations, it is those in food creation and delivery and sanitation we rely on.…
Read More >