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Staff Engagement

Employee Engagement Strategies

"Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way, looking at it differently might produce an answer."
Edward De Bono, Physician & Author

Organisations in the public and private sectors are under constant pressure to deliver results fast. A clear employee engagement strategy is not a ‘nice to have’ – it’s vital to keeping everyone focussed on successful outcomes.

Concentrating on staff satisfaction alone is ineffective!

Staff satisfaction and employee engagement are two very different things. For starters the latter is much harder to get right. Any business needs people who perform at their best most if not all of the time. So how do you know whether your people are engaged? How do you improve collective performance? Can you measure it so you know where to take action and whether it’s making any difference?

Disengaged people only work when they have to, don’t perform and are often a complete distraction to others. Your top performers are passionate, deliver and own problems and find solutions you had never even thought existed. Have you ever thought if I only had one good person instead of two mediocre performers, how much better we would be doing? Or if only I could find a way to raise the bar across my entire team and get all performing better. How fantastic that would feel and how much good it would do in the current economic climate?

We need clearer strategies to engage employees and create maximise output.

Here are some of the steps we take with our clients to develop and improve in this specific area:

First
We help you set a clear strategy along with some agreed objectives that people can identify with and get behind – sound easy and obvious? Well perhaps, but our experience is that many businesses and organisations don’t have these in place, resulting in staff being unclear about what is expected of them, they disconnect, get frustrated and leave – particularly top performers.

Second
We help ensure your Managers are fully on board and skilled up to lead the change. It is line Managers that really make the difference to people performance- most people leave their Manager and not the company.
They are the people that are responsible for improving output and getting the teams working effectively. We make sure they have the tools they need and the support network to be successful.

Third
Measurement tools and success criteria are the next thing we put in place fo successful employee engagemtn. It is important to be clear as to how success will be measured. Agree and implement some simple key performance indicators (KPI’s) that people can identify with. For example, levels of staff retention or numbers of people being promoted or taking development moves within the company. There’s a very familiar saying- ‘what gets measured get’s done’. So we utilise our employee engagement survey (not a staff satisfaction survey). Too many staff surveys will only tell you what people think. You need to know what’s important to them and what they think of those issues.

That’s where the difference can be made and when Managers take action the results we find are always stunning.

Communication is the key that unlocks the door to success

This is so important – no actually, it’s essential. A employee engagement programme without an internal communications strategy is pointless.

Staff and Managers may become suspicious if you don’t tell them what’s going on, disconnect and in some instances become disruptive to the programme.

There are techniques we teach our clients to use – both face to face and other forms of communications. These include, senior managers and leaders talking to staff to truly understand their issues. Holding regular staff updates where the key messages can be communicated and discussed.

Climbing our way out of the current economic situation will be achieved by the Managers and staff of all our businesses performing at the top end of our game – 100% of the time. A staff engagement programme is not “a nice to have” but an essential part of the business recovery toolkit for any organistion or company.

In summary it is people that make the difference to any business.

Developing an employee engagement strategy for change programmes & projects.

Ascot Barclay provides a comprehensive service comprising consultancy, design and implementation of a bespoke employee engagement strategy for your organisation.

For further information about all our services:

Telephone: 020 7608 5770,

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