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Late last year, a company approached us on the topic of employee engagement. They’d received the results of their biannual engagement survey and, as with previous years, realised that the data pointed them to strengths and potential weaknesses but didn’t help understand what was really going on, or what to do about it. The data might show that 63% of staff agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘I am proud to work for this company’ and this might be down 6% from the previous survey. On its own however, the data doesn’t help with the question “what does this mean and what should be done? ”
Narrative approaches are excellent for exploring these sorts of issues and helping organisations find out what is really going on, and what actions they can take to reinforce things that are going well, and improving things that need work. The survey data is vital ‘targeting information’ but on its own it is an insufficient basis for planning. Thus, exploring employee engagement is a natural marriage of traditional approaches such as surveys and the emerging practice of narrative.
Our approach to staff engagement looks like this:
Since the initial approach, several other unrelated opportunities have emerged to work with companies to explore their employee engagement outcomes. Our extensive work in leadership/management development also has a strong link to employee engagement (as the main roles of a manager can be summarised as ‘driving performance’ and ‘building engagement’). It looks like employee engagement is a growing area for us to apply narrative approaches.
About Mark Schenk
Mark works globally with senior leadership teams to improve their ability to communicate clearly and memorably. He has been a Director of Anecdote since 2004 and helped the company grow into one of the world’s leading business storytelling consultancies. Connect with Mark on:
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Rotkapchen Says:
August 8th, 2009 at 1:55 pm >
Why an initiative? Why not continuous?
Richard Parkes Cordock Says:
August 8th, 2009 at 6:51 pm >
This sentence “the main roles of a manager can be summarised as ‘driving performance’ and ‘building engagement’ – for me is the key to this article.
Too often management is focused on ‘tasks and activities’ where to really drive performance and build engagement, managers need to become better man-managers or mentors and connect the hearts and minds of employees with the values and vision of the company.
Your approach seems an interesting one, and one which would certainly tap into to that emotional connection.
Richard
Dave Nanderam Says:
August 9th, 2009 at 4:12 am >
Hi Mark, sounds like your firm is involved with some interesting narrative work in the employee engagement arena. I would also agree with your comment that this is a growing area of interest for firms- since competitive advantage is increasingly tied to the intellectual capital in the collective employee conscience.
As your narrative work evolves, quantitative approaches that measure behavioural outcomes like increased discretionary efforts and reduced turnover might also be useful in communicating the importance of a focus on employee engagement to your leadership group.
Best wishes
Dave
Mark Schenk Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 10:11 am >
Yes, continuous is the better word in this context. We use the term ‘initiative’ as a deliberate attempt to get people out of ‘project’ and ‘task’ thinking. Our experience is that people love to come up with big things that other people should do and find it quite difficult to identify small things that they (and others) can do themselves. This is part of our effort to generate behaviour change rather than extra things to go on a to-do list.
Mark Schenk Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 10:18 am >
Hi Richard
I like the simplicity of the ‘drive performance and build engagement’ construct. The challenge for managers is in striking the right balance. Of course this is made infinitely easier by managers thinking of their people as people rather than as objects (staff, resources etc). This helps managers do just about everything in an engaging way that connects with hearts and minds.
Mark Schenk Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 10:21 am >
Hi Dave,
Do you have any thoughts on quantitative measures/indicators for increased discretionary efforts?