Institute of Internal Communication

Katie Hadgraft, Head of Employee Communications and Engagement at Essex County Council, spoke at the IoIC conference in Chester about how the organisation is engaging its 48,000 staff.

She was quick to dispel the myth that Essex is all about white stilettos and white van men. Katie pointed out that the county has a £20bn economy and the council alone has a budget of £26m – although that is reducing.

Essex County Council is currently in the middle of massive transformation programme. Katie said that when she joined the organisation in 2008 employee engagement wasn't even on the radar. “We paid lip service to it,” she said, “With no joined-up thinking and no granular activity.”

The employee engagement and internal communications teams have now been brought together and there is a plan to get the 2012 employee engagement survey to show employee engagement levels have been pushed into the top quartile.

Katie said that the council had spent a long time, working on the basics:

• Understanding why employee engagement matters

• Looking at past employee survey results to work out what needed to be done

• Looking at how engagement levels are linked to sickness and absence figures.

As a result a corporate action plan was introduced, complete with new change and engagement tools.

She added: “We are also hoping to make engagement a performance metric for senior managers' appraisals and reviews.”

So having decided that engagement is a good thing, how has Essex County Council gone about improving it?

Katie says that the first thing you need to do is be clear about the role of the communications team and its responsibilities.

“We are a supporting and enabling team,” she said. “It is up to the line managers to look after the engagement of their own teams. We are there to support them.

“We use a wide range of tools, including magazines, intranet, face-to-face meetings and cascades. 'Carlsberg' workshops, where we said that if 'Carlsberg did engagement .... what would that look like?' were held with the parts of the business that were particularly disengaged.”

These proved particularly successful, but Katie is keen to show that her team facilitated and did not run them. “The theme was simple,” said Katie. “We asked the question 'What specifically can we do to change things for the better?'.”

The council has found that face-to-face meetings have been the most productive, with small groups being preferable to larger ones. Employee panels have also been tasked to produce action plans as a result of survey results.

The action plans are made public on the council's intranet and the organisation also has employee engagement champions

Leaders have also been encouraged to “get off their bums” and get out and meet people.

“We've said that they need to be out there, be authentic and lead from the front,” Katie said.

So how does Katie know if her team is adding value?

“We have seen an improvement in the results of 13 of the communication/engagement questions in the annual survey,” Katie said. “A quick check we ask on a quarterly basis is 'do you believe the organisation communicates effectively with you?'. Two thirds of respondents said yes – it is just a quick temperature check, but the feedback is vital.

“We also use a simple performance scorecard to check that we are supporting the business effectively and helping our colleagues to achieve their objectives.”

Katie summarises her approach with:

• Build strong relationships with your HR and L&D colleagues who should be close to the people side of the business and work with them to identify “hot spots” of disengagement in your organisation. If you are disconnected from the teams that look after “people” issues it will be harder to drive effective engagement.

• Leadership matters: make sure that your leadership team really understands the link between high levels of employee engagement and high levels of performance/customer service/profits. If they “get it” then it will help them to drive engagement through great personal communications. Make sure they understand that engagement is their responsibility.

• Talk the language that your leaders will connect with: be clear on the business benefits of high levels of employee engagement to your own organisation and sell them. For example, find out where you have the highest levels of sickness absence and churn, and calculate the cost of that to your business. Those teams are probably also the most disengaged.

• Run a regular employee engagement survey at the most granular level your organisation can withstand and use this as a focus for driving change at a local level.

• Articulate what “good” looks like for your organisation and ensure you are clear on how you are measuring it. Make sure that you have an employee engagement index and a ratio of engaged to disengaged employees that you can target for improvement.

• Ensure effective action planning following the employee survey – no need to act as “policemen”, but do record and communicate where change is happening as a result of action planning at a local level and ensure leaders are clear where it is not happening effectively.

• Be clear what your role is: you will add value as employee engagement consultants, supporting the business with high-quality interventions to drive employee engagement levels through effective communications. But you don't “own” employee engagement – your organisation does.

• The personal touch will have most impact: focus on face-to-face communications engagement workshops; leadership drop-in sessions or lunches; employee discussion panels; leadership roadshows. Anything that gives employees the chance to interact with leaders and each other.

You can download Katie's PowerPoint presentation as given at the 2010 Chester IoIC Conference.