Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance through Employee Engagement.
Here is a very important UK report on Employee Engagement. Watch this short video by David MacLeod:
MacLeod Employee Engagement Report Keys for Engagement = clarity, engaging managers, employee voice, fused values & behaviors.
Click here for a free copy of the 157 page PDF report. I will read this report and write a longer report in the near future.
Here is the YouTube description of the short 3 minute video:
David MacLeod and Nita Clarke were commissioned by the Department for Business (BIS) to take an in-depth look at employee engagement and to report on its potential benefits for organisations and employees. The Secretary of State for Business, Lord Mandelson, encouraged the independent reviewers to examine whether a wider take up of engagement approaches could impact positively on UK competitiveness and performance, and meet the challenges of increased global competition.
The independent reviewers answer is an unequivocal yes. Since Autumn 2008 they have seen many examples of companies and organisations where performance and profitability have been transformed by employee engagement; they have met many employees who are only too keen to explain how their working lives have been transformed; and have read many studies which show a clear correlation between engagement and performance and most importantly between improving engagement and improving performance.
Click here for John Ingham’s review of the report.
David, my review is here:
http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2009/07/macleod-review.html .
In overview, I thought it was a more valuable document than I thought it was going to be (David MacLeod’s book on engagement isn’t one of my favourites). And it contains lots of great information on engagement which makes it almost as valuable a resource as this ning!
I just thought the conclusions were a bit lacking (I don’t see government as key to improving things) – but this is of course where it gets more difficult. If it was easy, there’d be no point in the review, and I guess the 1322 people here would be doing something else with their time.
But it’s certainly a very significant contribution to raising awareness and generating thinking – in the UK and elsewhere.
Jon,
I appreciate your comment. And it sure does have a lot of useful information. I saw a criticism about lack of specific recommendations so I guess that is similar to your view about conclusions. I appreciate that it has given more attention to employee engagement and may add more credibility to the people who see engagement as mushy stuff.
David
In Lord Mandelson’s introduction to this report he states:“organisations that truly engage and inspire their employees produce world class levels of innovation”
The key word is innovation, yet I get no sense that this is high up on leadership agenda. In fact, the report says that leaders believe that innovation will become more increasingly important over the next three years yet managers appear to be increasingly less likely to encourage innovation in the workplace: less than half of all employees say that their manager encouraged and supported new ways of doing things, developing their own ideas or trying out new ideas (decline of 20% in the last year).
For me the priority for change in business is for leaders to adopt more innovative ways to engage their managers and their employees. That’s not about micro-analysis of ‘performance’ measures and ‘engagement’ scores but encouraging innovation and ideas in the workplace that are focused on competitive advantage and differentiation of your brand. That’s what inspires people. Even the micro-analysts will be inspired as they will be able to show an increase in ‘performance’ and ‘engagement’ metrics. A win-win.
Sean:
Excellent points about innovation.
David