Today is much more personal than professional.

On Valentine’s Day, don’t read blogs, be with the ones you love.

When you get back to business I hope that you can put your heart into your work and that work is an inclusive pathway to your love.

Photo Credit: Camera toss: heart by http://flickr.com/photos/frenkieb/71257761/

Employee Engagement: ZENgagement

Do you have freedom within the rules and regulations of work?

To preserve a sense of freedom even in the midst of rules and regulations is to preserve a part of our identities free from the strictures and responsibilities of success, career, and corporation. The measure or our continuing individuality in any work is the refusal to be swallowed by our goals, our ambitions, or our company no matter how marvelous they may be. ~ David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea.

Photo Credit: Rose for a black diamond by http://flickr.com/photos/helios89/496674783/in/set-72157594438324424/

Conclusion

This is the fifth in a five part series interview with Graeme Ginsberg from London. Graeme is the Managing Editor, Research and Reports for Melcrum – the international research and training company focused on internal communication. I requested the interview go get a better understanding of Melcrum’s research and their current publication: The Practitioner’s Guide, Essential Techniques for Employee Engagement.

The Practitioner’s Guide really delves into these techniques with practical processes, advice, tips, and checklists. What will the reader be able to do after reading about these techniques?

Readers will gain a thorough understanding of what the techniques are, why organizations need them and how to apply them. Each chapter is written by a leading engagement expert, who walks readers through the steps of the process, providing templates, meeting agendas, sample questions and other tools so the readers can get up and running straight away. There are also case studies to illustrate how the processes have been applied in major organizations, including McDonald’s, Rolls-Royce, Royal Mail, DRS Technologies and O2. The chapter authors are:

• Action teams – Linda Dulye, President and Founder, L.M. Dulye and Co.
• Appreciative Inquiry – Caryn Vanstone, Business Director, Ashridge Consulting
• Message Maps – David Grossman, President, dg&a
• Tony Quinlan – Principal, Narate

Are there any other statistics in your latest survey research of 1,625 professionals in HR and communications that stood out for you?

I’m certainly surprised by how many organizations aren’t measuring employee engagement. Around a quarter of organizations with engagement on the agenda use a dedicated survey and 44% use a standard opinion survey, but a quarter still aren’t measuring it at all. Those organizations with a formal program are much more likely to use a dedicated survey than those that have engagement as part of a general philosophy, but even 7% of those with a formal program don’t measure.

Also, a really important and interesting area is regional variation. We’ve recently published some very extensive research into communicating effectively with global workforces, and national culture is a very major factor when it comes to engagement. For example, if you look at those key engagement drivers mentioned earlier – senior leadership and direct supervisors – the perception of what ‘good’ leadership or management is may be very different from country to country. For example, employees in North America and Western European countries tend to like their leaders to involve them in decision-making, while those in Russia and Eastern countries expect their leaders and managers to be authoritative

Actually, it’s even more complex than this. Even sweeping terms for territories like “the West” are misleading – there can be quite major differences within any particular territory also. For example, in our employee engagement survey data, if you look at ‘large’ organizations (i.e. more than 10,000 employees), 17% of respondents from large organizations in North America (US and Canada) said their organization doesn’t have employee engagement on the agenda, compared with 3% from UK large organizations. And, when it comes to techniques being used by large organizations, employee action teams are significantly more prevalent in North American organizations compared with those in the UK, while storytelling is significantly more prevalent in UK organizations compared with those in the US.

So, global organizations have to be very careful when they’re looking at engaging employees in different countries and not just take a ‘one size fits all’ approach. They can’t just adopt engagement strategies or techniques and apply them in the same way across all their different offices.

Graeme, as we conclude, is there anything else you’d like to add?We’ve produced a summary of key findings from the employee engagement survey – please let your readers know they can download it free of charge at: http://www.melcrum.com/offer/etee/surveysummary.pdf This summary also includes further details about the Guide. Thank you for your time and input. I believe that Essential Techniques for Employee Engagement will be a very valuable contribution to any organization’s employee engagement efforts.Many thanks, David, great to talk with you.

Message Maps and the Rationale for the 4 Techniques of Employee Engagement

This is the fourth in a five part series interview with Graeme Ginsberg from London. Graeme is the Managing Editor, Research and Reports for Melcrum – the international research and training company focused on internal communication. I requested the interview go get a better understanding of Melcrum’s research and their current publication: The Practitioner’s Guide, Essential Techniques for Employee Engagement.

I think the technique that many readers may be unfamiliar with is message maps. I believe a message map is a visual communication tool to help individuals tell their organization’s story more effectively. Is that correct? Can you tell us a little more about this.

Message maps help managers capture the core messages of a topic. The topic might be something quite broad and abstract in nature – like where the organization, an initiative or an individual is heading. Or it might be something tangible – for example, an announcement about a product launch or annual conference. Message maps act like blueprints that guide all subsequent communication on the topic – ensuring consistency, whether it’s a CEO speech, an employee newsletter, website copy, a press release, marketing collateral, or whatever.

When it comes to creating the message map after the messaging session, less is definitely more – it’s presenting core and supporting messages so they’re really transparent and accessible. But the message map doesn’t necessarily need to be ‘visual’ in the sense of having arrows and boxes. It’ll depend really on the organizational culture and the topic – the message map could equally be a more traditional page of bulleted text. The Guide gives an example of each type of message map.

Can you tell us why you focused on these particular techniques? What was the background to this Guide?

It was becoming clear to us from our conversations with communication and HR professionals that the discussion around engagement had moved on considerably. Organizations weren’t so much debating what employee engagement means and whether it can drive business performance – they were now telling us that they wanted to know how they could actually achieve it. We had already produced our Employee Engagement report in 2005 – a very comprehensive research report covering the strategic issues around engagement – and we realized that one of our Pracitioner’s Guides would be the best way to provide the hard-hitting “how to” information that they needed for implementation.

We talked to practitioners at our annual employee engagement conferences in the UK, US, Australia and Europe and they told us that they really wanted to understand the techniques for engaging employees, rather than simply getting more information about particular channels. Action teams, Appreciative Inquiry, message maps and storytelling quickly emerged as the techniques most widely used by organizations – and also the ones that people wanted to know most about – so we focused on them.

Part 5 (next post): Conclusion

Here is a short and thoughtful visual break on Employee Engagement: Results That Matter.

Permission granted by Elizabeth Perry from woolgathering:

Source: http://www.elizabethperry.com/woolgathering/archives/002325.html

Key Drivers and the guide’s 4 techniques of Employee Engagement

This is the third in a five part series interview with Graeme Ginsberg from London. Graeme is the Managing Editor, Research and Reports for Melcrum – the international research and training company focused on internal communication. I requested the interview go get a better understanding of Melcrum’s research and their current publication: The Practitioner’s Guide, Essential Techniques for Employee Engagement.

What conclusions do you have about the key drivers of employee engagement?

Senior leadership and direct supervisors are still by far the most important drivers – nothing has really changed there since our engagement survey in 2005. Around 25% of respondents in organizations that conduct a driver analysis said senior leadership is the most important driver and around 25% said direct supervisors. This probably isn’t too much of a surprise since these are the people that employees look to for understanding what the organization’s values are and where it’s heading, and these are the people who shape the environment the employees work in and their day-to-day work. If leaders and managers are giving the ‘wrong’ messages, employees feel insecure, confused, cynical, demotivated – in short, disengaged.  The next most highly rated drivers in our survey were “compensation and benefits”, “opportunities for career advancement” and “people-centric culture” – each rated as most important by around 9% of respondents. I mention this to people and they say, “Well the first two are hardly surprising, everyone wants more money in the bank and a bigger desk to work on”, but I don’t think it’s only about that at all. There are really emotional elements underpinning these – salary, skills and job title have a major impact on self-esteem, confidence, security, trust, and so on. If organizations are keen to engage their employees, they need to look more deeply at the drivers – not just which drivers are important, but also why they’re important.The Guide focuses on four key techniques: action teams, appreciative inquiry, message maps, and storytelling. Would you briefly outline each one. Sure. Very broadly speaking:Employee action teams are created to work with leaders to identify engagement goals and develop strategies to achieve them.Appreciative inquiry brings employees at all levels together in a collaborative process to discover what are the factors that have made the organization or an initiative succeed, then envision ideals built on these factors and design how these ideals can be turned into a reality.

Message maps are a way of capturing the core messages simply and efficiently. The focus in the messaging process is on achieving the deepest understanding of the topic, who the key audience are and what that audience’s needs are.

Storytelling is the gathering, distilling and communicating of essential information about the organization through a narrative or narrative elements. This brings a ‘human’ quality to the facts and data so employees can really relate to it.

Part 4 (next post): Message maps and the rationale for the specific 4 techniques.