Employee Engagement: The Challenge of Today

Employee engagement is something we hear a lot of at the moment from Human Resources directors. Companies are continually looking for ways to engage their employees and to achieve higher scores in employee satisfaction surveys.

At Votive Leadership we believe that engagement is part of each of us learning how to Self-Lead. Self-leadership is something that we believe is a key element of a happy and successful work life and yet is a topic that is rarely taught. From our experience of working in many different organisations, in different sectors, we find many unhappy, disgruntled, disengaged, disenfranchised employees. These tend to be those who are not yet in leadership positions – the “followers” in an organisation; those who are carrying out immensely valuable pieces of work for their organisation.

During October and November 2007, we ran a series of self-leadership programmes for the operations/clerical function of a FTSE top 100 financial institution. Up to 15 people per time were invited to a 3-hour session and overall we worked with around 200 people. Comments that we heard at the start of each of these sessions are typical of those we hear in many organisations:

“We’re just a number these days”
“Management only care about costs”
“It never used to be like this”
“We’re understaffed”

Over each of the 3-hour sessions we listened, empathised, coached and also delivered some hard-hitting messages – but all done in the context of a fun, and dynamic learning experience. At the end of every session we asked attendees to agree or disagree with six key statements. All the answers were collated and the results are shown below:

Attendees were asked – “As a direct result of this programme, I fee more able to:”

	Agree*	Disagree*
Take responsibility for my job/career	96%	4%
Give feedback	94%	6%
Ask for feedback	97%	3%
Enjoy my job more	94%	6%
Be more motivated more of the time	97%	3%
Speak up more	94%	6%

*Of those who expressed a choice. A handful of people neither agreed nor disagreedDelivering the above feedback to the leaders at the organisation, the comment that best sums up the power of the above is one leader saying “We would KILL for results like that in our employee satisfaction survey!”

How did we achieve such amazing results? Without giving away too much about our unique proposition, we work with attendees on “correcting” some of the thoughts that they have in their head and also sometimes just tell them how it is. As an example, many of the people we work with have been in an organisation many years and in their head they compare the current state of the organisation, its values and their own job with “how it used to be.” By the end of our sessions they realise that all the time any of us compare our current situation to the past it can lead to feeling disappointed, upset and even angry. We also work with attendees on helping them REALLY understand what, for example, “providing shareholder value” means to them and how it affects them directly.

If you would like to learn more about this specific project or how we can help you increase employee engagement, please contact Votive Leadership.

keith@votiveleadership.com | 07977 519773

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