No one wants to be engaged

There was a great article about employee engagement last week

https://hrmagazine.co.uk/article-details/is-engagement-fact-or-fiction

I took away: If you are talking – to your people or leaders - about improving engagement, then you’re on the wrong track. Because:

• ·        for your people – no-one wants you to make them more “engaged”
  What your people DO want is the conditions, communications and culture that allows them to be engaged. To understand what they need to do, to commit to delivering, and what they get in return
  They’re not bothered if you measure engagement are either, they just want you to understand how to improve

• ·         for your leaders – by itself, they don’t give a monkey’s how engaged your people are
  They DO care about how your people treat customers, if they give a consistent experience, if they pull together to perform better
  That’s what you need to be measuring; those are the links you should be trying to make.

It’s a simple process. 1) Work out what will make the most difference to your employees’ ability to belong, commit, perform. 2) Do that. 3) Then measure how much that improves your organisation. 4) Repeat.

The rest is distraction. If you’re talking in terms of “building” or “creating” or “measuring” engagement, then you ought to reassess your priorities.

Internal Comms Fails

What’s your favourite example of an internal comms fail?

I heard a good one the other week, and it’s really stuck with me.

It was in a manufacturing environment, with all the difficulties there are in getting the sustained attention of the workforce.

With an important announcement to be made, all staff were taken to an event at a local hotel. Those who had been there remembered exactly where it was, and a real range of detail, down to the plastic glasses that they thought rather cheap.

And they certainly didn’t forget the giveaway to support the event – a frisbee. Some even still had it.

But what no-one had retained was the purpose of the event.

Even allowing for the bravado, and the naughty-schoolboyness, that this kind of environment tends to bring – I really don’t think any of them had taken much of use away.

So, there was very little chance of changing their perception or behaviour. I’m guessing they came back to work and carried on exactly as before. Just with the promise of a game of frisbee at the end of the day.

It’s such a waste of time and resources. You don’t get many of these opportunities and this one was totally missed.

You got any good / bad examples?