Secrets of Engaging Employees

Engagement requires more than a sophisticated approach to employee communication. To engage with the organisation, employees need to believe it is the right thing to do and that their own goals align with yours. This event examines the underlying drivers of engagement for different individuals and explores approaches and activities that build to create an engaging work environment. We guarantee that you will come away with fresh ideas for taking your organisation forward. Through action learning and discussion this event will prepare you to create an environment where engagement and high performance is a natural conclusion.

• Do you find your managers are pressing the wrong buttons with their employees?
• Do you find that instead of leading and coaching high performance they are getting a poor response from employees?
• Do you want to achieve a culture of high engagement and high performance in your organisation?

Here’s how to GUARANTEE that your managers know how to ENGAGE THEIR TEAM in doing the right things to take your organisation forward.

The fact is that engaging employees is very easy in concept IF you know how to do it.

The bad news is… lots of organisations are trying all the right things but are still not getting to the nub of their issues, still not changing their culture and still not raising their employees’ overall levels of performance.

If you are an HR professional with an operational focus or a key operational manager with a people focus then this event – ‘Secrets of Engaging your People’ is for you.

What is employee engagement?

Engagement is defined as

‘the measure of an employees emotional and intellectual commitment to their organisation and its success’

An engaged employee:

• Looks for, and is given, opportunities to improve organisational performance
• Is positive about the job and the organisation
• Believes in the organisation
• Works actively to make things better
• Treats others with respect, and helps colleagues to perform more effectively
• Can be relied on to go beyond the requirements of their job
• Sees the bigger picture, even at personal cost
• Identifies with the organisation
• Keeps up to date with developments in his/her field

Most of us have a few prize employees who perform at this level, and many others who don’t. The point is that each of us has the potential to be engaged, and would prefer and enjoy being highly engaged in our work, but something stops us being there.

As an employer, you have the opportunity to choose the degree of engagement you would like to foster. If you prefer employees come to work, do their job and go home without much involvement from you, then read no further. This event is not for you.

If, on the other hand, you would like to attract and encourage your people to the extent that they are charmed and delighted to work with you, then this event will be interesting and helpful for you. We will explore the approaches and activities that build to create an engaging work environment. We guarantee that you will come away with fresh ideas for taking your organisation forward. We aim to help you create an environment where engagement and performance is a natural conclusion., where engagement acts as a magnet to align your people with your organisational goals and aspirations.

What you Don’t see when you first begin to work on this issue…

This is where the law of unintended consequences really gets to work! When we begin to Well the first thing is to measure current levels of engagement and it is very common for organisations to ask questions that are likely to generate a positive response. After all, what would happen if the leaders managers got bad news? How would they react? Inadvertently, we can skew the data before we even start.

The next likely pressure point comes when you learn that people don’t trust senior managers enough and don’t think middle management offers enough recognition to employees. In response, you put leadership and management development programmes in place and these are met with a reasonable amount of enthusiasm. All your managers go through them and eventually the next survey shows little change in people’s experience, behaviour or perception of their behaviour.

Their expectations have gone up and they still perceive management as under-performing and unwilling to recognise good performance or deal with poor performance in a timely way, despite the improvements that might have been made. This results in a feeling of cynicism about management and the employer in general which gets harder to influence or change as time goes by.

Another aspect that frequently occurs if the right questions have been asked is employees’ frustration with the other departments they work with. They describe a picture of departments pulling in opposite directions, making it hard to get things done.

The causes of these problems can be complex and subtle and hidden from view unless you are asking the right questions. The purpose of measuring engagement is not just to know what level it is, but more to know how to improve it.

And then, you learn that people don’t trust senior managers and don’t think middle management offers enough recognition to employees. So, you put leadership and management development programmes in place. They are met with a reasonable amount of enthusiasm, and everyone goes on them eventually, but the next survey shows little change in people’s experience, behaviour or perception of their behaviour.

Their expectations have gone up and they still perceive management as under-performing and unwilling to recognise good performance or deal with poor performance in a timely way. This results in a feeling of cynicism about management and the employer in general which gets harder to influence or change as time goes by.

Another aspect you become aware if you have asked the right questions is employees’ frustration with other departments they work with. They describe a picture of departments pulling in opposite directions, making it hard to get things done.

But there’s good news!

Meet the team who can show you how to ensure your engagement strategies really work, right from the first day.

Companies that we work with find that engaged employees generate increased customer satisfaction and productivity. One client was able to increase revenues by 300% in 3 years after putting an engagement approach into practice.

How did they do this? They took the step to involve the workforce formally in the day to day management of their business, working to very clear measures and business targets. This dramatic step was welcomed enthusiastically and freed up time for the hard working managers to focus on the more strategic issues; generating further business and focusing on resolving critical problems and delivering customer service.

The hidden benefit that revealed itself was that lower level employees suddenly had a development route and talented people could see their way to higher level positions and management. As a result, when the operation expanded to encompass a new site, they were able to staff key positions through internal promotions, keeping talent that might have gone elsewhere. Their internal team working processes were already strong and provided the level of support the new promotees needed to be able to work successfully. As a good employer, this client has a well deserved reputation.

This solution elegantly encompassed the range of factors that increase engagement including:

• Alignment of goals with strategy
• Leadership Direction and Support
• Two way communication
• Purposeful delegation
• Performance management
• Recognition
• Learning and development
• Clear decision making processes

They found that by encouraging managers to take responsibility and ownership for engagement within their teams, they influenced the key relationships fundamental for success. We have designed a new training event for managers who want to improve performance through engagement in their business and throughout their teams and who need to encourage effective engagement behaviours in others.

The Event

Secrets of Engaging your Employees (1 Day Event)

What you will learn

In this highly interactive workshop, we will explore the strategic factors that drive engagement and the interpersonal actions that influence it, in relation to your own organisation. We will facilitate you and your managers in how to plan and implement an effective engagement strategy for your organisation.

The Agenda

• What engagement means for employers
  • What employers experience when the workforce is engaged
  • What behaviours are typically exhibited

• The case for engaging employees
  • Presentation on results of global surveys
  • Short case studies of different organisations
  • The link between engagement and business performance

• Vision and model for engagement
  • The value of visioning to define culture and ways of working
  • Linking to business performance objectives
  • Experiential exercise

• Measuring engagement
  • How to use surveys to measure engagement
  • Good practice in running engaging engagement surveys
  • The value of external benchmarking
  • The value of repeat exercises
  • How to link engagement surveys to corporate strategies

• Interpreting results
  • How to use data to determine appropriate initiatives
  • How to ensure your interpretation is realistic

• Case Studies
  • In-depth case study of one organisation and how they engaged employees more closely in managing their business to great advantage

• Planning for increasing engagement
  • The organisational elements, processes and structures that create engagement
  • How to build on the elements that are already in place
  • Issues in implementing changes
  • How to ensure effective two way communication throughout the process
  • How to encourage a culture of genuine respect

• The strategy game
  • An experiential exercise with three scenarios to practice planning to increase engagement

• Personal planning
  • Your personal learning points
  • Planning to generate further engagement in your own organisation
  • Review and critique of your ideas

• Review

The benefits to you

Following this event, you will have:

• Information to build a business case for engagement in your organisation
• An engagement model to apply to your organisation
• An understanding of the factors that create a climate of engagement
• Awareness of the levers that your organisation needs to influence
• An understanding of how to use surveys to measure engagement effectively
• Tips on making surveys engaging to participants
• Tips on how to use survey information to generate strategies for change
• Approaches for communicating engagement strategies in to the organisation
• New perspectives in dynamic coaching to increase your managers’ skill levels
• A plan for developing engagement within the next 6 months
• Practice in developing a strategy for engaging teams

100% Guarantee

We are so confident that you will be delighted that we guarantee that if you are not 100% happy with the learning you gain from this event, we will give you your money back. No quibbles, just a cast iron guarantee.

We guarantee that if you are not 100% happy with the learning you gain from this event, we will offer you your money back. No quibbles, just a cast iron guarantee.

Please contact us via email at info@cooteharvard.co.uk or by telephone on +44 (0) 1767 631875 or +44 (0) 7711 419292 for a quotation for your organisation

Coote Harvard is a consulting, coaching and training firm specialising in helping organisations like yours create conditions for extraordinary employee engagement.

We help you and your teams understand, survey and develop the drivers of engagement and minimise personal and organisational barriers to success. We focus on practical ways to link Human Capital and operational performance and promote success behaviours throughout your organisation.