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True employee engagement is about co-creation – therefore involving a distributive style of leadership that liberates staff creativity but also, inevitably, carries with it a degree of risk. Engage for Change MD John Smythe highlighted the power of this approach, alongside the spectrum of ways in which organisations communicate with their employees. These include telling (leaders decide for you); selling (they decide but in a persuasive way); inclusion ( a degree of involvement but mainly at the execution stage); and co-creation (the right people are drawn in to be involved before decision-making starts). He provided a striking example of how co-creation can work in practice, in a crisis situation where the temptation would typically have been to take a more controlling approach. A group of ten businesses in the UK were experiencing business difficulties. The global parent company, which had a traditional hierarchical approach that had been mirrored in individual businesses, had no interest in bailing them out. Engage for Change worked with the group of UK businesses to develop a co-creation approach to the problem, implementing a 90-day engage for recovery process. Firstly, it had to be made clear to everyone in the businesses that this was indeed a battle for survival, that might not succeed, and that everyone had to pitch in to maximise the likelihood of success. The senior management team then had to decide on non-negotiables, for example the amount of cost that had to be taken out of the business. However, in the course of these discussions, it became clear that there were relatively few points that they had to decide on and action totally by themselves. Staff then had a major involvement in the development of ideas and strategies for identifying efficiencies and new revenue streams. They knew that there were going to be major changes and that lay-offs would be necessary, but the overall situation was much more constructive because of their direct involvement. Recent Engage for Change research undertaken by YouGov has highlighted the most influential drivers for effective engagement in organisations. Well-governed power-sharing comes in at number one. Making it clear that this is a means towards achieving high levels of business performance is another, along with ensuring that leaders at all levels have engagement capabilities. Key factors affecting the level of engagement felt by individual employees include:
Hearteningly, the research also found that spend on engagement has gone up despite current economic conditions. However, it also confirms some of the challenges associated with leadership discussed elsewhere in the conference, with the sobering statistic that only two in five employees rate their leaders as effective. |
