Practically Engaging Workshops

Impact is an international consultancy majoring in leadership, employee engagement, management development and team working. We are proud to be a Times Top 10 company and the third best workplace in the Great Places to Work benchmark.

Andy Dickson writes…….

Employee Engagement is at the top of the agenda. Something that I believe most people in HR would always have recognised but maybe under other names. “Capturing the hearts and minds of your people”, “Being a good place to work” and “People being our greatest asset” are hardly new terms but could all be used to explain the new frame of reference made main stream recently and re enforced by the recent Macleod report. At the moment Employee Engagement topics are everywhere and for some reason there seems to be confusion over exactly what it is and how to make it happen.

I am a general manager of a medium sized business. We are international with 200 people in 14 countries. We happen to be a leadership consultancy but that isn’t the hat I am wearing for this discussion, rather that of a general manager of an SME with all the challenges that brings.

For the last five years we have been placed in the Times Top 100 companies to work for and in this year’s Great Places to work benchmark we came third of which we are very proud. Interestingly, two of our customers came first and second, Danone and Google.

It is hard work and I need to stress this from the outset. You have to work hard to engage your employees and whatever works this year will simply set a higher benchmark and expectations for next year. Speaking of this recession year it is worth mentioning that like many businesses we have had to reduce head count overall by about 30 people. For a company that works hard to attract and retain talented people and create a workplace they don’t want to leave that is really tough.

This article briefly shares our story of what we have been through as a business specifically looking at the processes that I believe have contributed to achieving high levels of engagement. I hope that these examples will at least spark off ideas for you and your particular organisation but I realise that organisations are all different and the number of employees and sector you are in all have their own challenges. All that said, I believe that many aspects of employee engagement are similar across sector and size and that at times these are used as excuses rather than fact for not carrying out new practices.

Firstly, I will describe four milestones on our journey. These are times when we did something that had a major effect on employee engagement. To help you put the whole jigsaw together you can download a document of our thoughts on employee engagement and leadership. Finally Liz Wilson, our HR Manager, had a series of eight challenges that we set the CIPD groups and has collated their top tips.

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