Principles and Benefits of Engagement
5 December 2008
In Terms of Engagement, Richard H. Axelrod, (ISBN 1576750841) describes four key principles that help engage people in organisational change. The four are;
- Widening the circle of involvement
- Connecting people to each other and ideas
- Creating communities for action, and
- Embracing democracy.
He describes the benefits of engagement as
- People grasp the big picture, fully understanding the dangers and opportunities.
- Urgency and energy are created as people become aligned around a common purpose and create new directions.
- Accountability is more evenly distributed throughout the organisation as people come to understand the whole system.
- Collaboration across organisational boundaries increases because people are connected to the issues and to each other.
- Broad participation quickly identifies performance gaps and their solutions, improving productivity and customer satisfaction.
- Creativity increases as people from all levels and functions along with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders contribute their best ideas.
- Capacity for future change increases as people develop the skills and processes to meet not just the current challenges but future challenges as well.
What are your thoughts on this as a summary of the key principles and benefits of employee engagement?
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Getting the best from consultants?
15 November 2008
As clients from time to time use our services...I thought it might be interesting to write a piece of advice, totally unbiased of course, that might assist anyone looking to use consultants in acquiring the best option.
What questions would you consider as best practise if / when you were to hire a consultant?
Here are my starters for ten.
~ Be clear on your organisation objectives
~ Be clear on the link between the project under consideration and those higher objectives
~ Be clear on exactly what, where, when and why you need help
~ Take an inventory of knowledge and skills internally before going outside
~ Determine who would oversee the project internally and involve them as early as possible
~ Prepare a clear brief & have someone outside your team read through it to sense check it
~ Work out a precise budget of time, resources, materials, equipment, facilities and money
~ Draw up legal contracts and terms as well as Service Level Agreements
~ Insist upon financial transparency with the potential supplier(s)
~ Test the potential supplier’s culture & values through talking to current clients
Maybe most importantly...
~ Do more than interview the potential suppliers ~ interviews are very poor means of recruiting talent of any kind.
What questions would you consider as best practise if / when you were to hire a consultant?
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At what point do you appoint internal brand police?
30 October 2008
I’ve just returned from a few days working with a client so firstly sorry for the lack of blogs. The experience, whilst a very positive one ~ for me and client ~ has brought up an interesting thought.
At what point do you recruit / assign internal "brand police"?
The client is a £60 million firm that has a strong external brand within its market place and a well established relaxed family culture for its 200 or so employees. What became clear is that the organisation lacks a repository of brand images and house styles such that internal correspondence and much of day to day correspondence to clients do not conform to the brand values or support the external marketing effort.
Marketing is doing a great job as is the PR team. Nearly all that effort is focussed externally and the nearest it gets to an internal focus is probably the support Marketing & PR bring to the Bids Teams in response to Invitations To Tender and Requests For Proposals.
I’d be interested to hear from those of you that have taken the decision to create that internal focus, or helped clients through that decision and discuss some of the factors involved.
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Does everyone contribute in your meetings..?
22 September 2008
Back in 1979 the Schnelle brothers recorded a series of meetings to establish the number and pattern of utterances per hour in meetings. This research showed that in most meetings
- Only about one third of those attending actual say anything
- Pareto (80/20 rule) applies and a small number talk the most
No surprise there then but at least you can now quote some research to back up previous personal experience...
In addition the adventurous Schnelle brothers found that the inclusion of a moderator or facilitator helped to give a better distribution of active participation. Although the figures show that the same people still tend to talk the most, their contribution is reduced by around 25% and typically everyone does get to say something.
Be careful those who do not speak, at all or very much, may still be very involved, use of the mouth is not a good indicator of engagement...
Male Domination
Being a bloke myself, I do declare a bias, but in this case I have to concur with what Dale Spender found in his research (1970 ~ 1980 ~ 1996 ~ she was a busy girl)
She found that;
- Men talked more than women in mixed sex conversations
- Men typically determined the topic
- Men interrupt more than women (some 98% more...Ouch!)
- The majority of men defined a good conversation as one where they held the floor
- The majority of women defined a good conversation as one where everyone had a turn.
There are other issues Dale identified, but as a bloke it is too painful to write them down...
Dale’s research has been challenged but those who have repeated her work since (Belenky 1997 ~ Gilligan 1982 ~ and others) found similar results.
For some men and for some women issues like finding a voice and being heard make participating in meetings difficult. If we loose the valid contribution of 20% to 30% of those attending because of similar issues the return on the investment in bringing the group together is severely damaged.
Whether you are chairing meetings or facilitating meetings you have a responsibility to lay down some ground rules and a clear process before you start as well as provide the group feedback on the pattern and quality of communication as the event progresses.
What are your thoughts on effective ground rules for meetings?
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Measuring the effectiveness of internal communication
4 August 2008
The 2005 FEIEA (the Federation of Business Communicator Associations in Europe) survey of it’s members in 13 countries across
Showed that
85 per cent say internal communication in their organisations has become more important in the last few years
92 per cent said their most time consuming job remains internal magazine production.
46 per cent believe the notice-boards are an effective communication tool
69 per cent of internal communication in 2005 is still ‘top down’
28 per cent is lateral or cross-level communication
1 per cent of communicators is bottom-up communication
They listed the five biggest barriers to effective communication as
Low management commitment to communication (76 per cent),
Lack of time (65 per cent),
Ineffective organisation structure (59 per cent),
Insufficient communications skills (50 per cent) and
Ill-defined communication goals (44 per cent).
But what do such surveys, audits and reports show us. Statistics and Politicians can be easily slipped into the same sentence as spin, mis-information and not-invented-here.
For internal communication to earn its place in the boardroom or at least secure some influence over the Senior Management Team and their decisions the link between the communication initiatives and the bottom line results needs to be established. If the statistics above were from our own organisation we might develop some opinions on what needs to happen next, and hopefully it won’t be put up more notice boards or increase top down team briefs...
With the right approach to measuring the effectiveness of internal communication it is more than possible to demonstrate help internal communication helps every other well recognised department fulfil their role. Without good and robust measurement systems in place that are trusted by other Senior Managers it will be hard to argue the case for more or even continued funding.
Levels
It is possible to measure a whole range of the elements
The Message itself
The Programme the message is apart of
The Channel used to transmit / receive the message
The Retention of the message by those who received it
The Deployment of the message in the behaviour change of those who received it
The Impact on the Programme / Project / Business Unit
It is possible to collect hard and soft data (quantitative & qualitative) about any of the above depending on whether you require purely the hard numbers or the reactions of those involved.
First things first
Before you get out your calculators and start counting be sure you have a very clear understanding of the Senior Management goals or ambitions for the business and the relevance of the communication initiative you are measuring.
Why is more important than what and what is more important than how.
Once you’ve established why you are collecting the information and its link to the strategic goals of the organisation you can more easily workout what to measure. Once you’ve established the why and the what it is relatively easy to work out how you are going to set about measuring the communication.
Effectiveness and Efficiency
Remember to balance the data search between the two of the main value drivers for any venture. Effectiveness and efficiency. There is little point in establishing the costs versus coverage ratio if you have no indication as the impact you made.
Begin with the end in mind
Good Ole Stephen Covey comes into play here too. Before you go too far work out what is going to happen to the data you collect and how it is going to be used, this can also influence what you research and how you go about it.
Research tools
All research tools used successfully in other disciplines have their place with internal communication measurement for instance;
Benchmarking externally and internally (one department versus another)
Survey
Questionnaires
Audits
Focus Groups
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The dance of the facilitators
19 July 2008
What does dancing have to do with facilitation?
Ideally the interaction between facilitator and delegates should be like a dance. Dancing is one of the most powerful forms of human interaction, a partnership where those involved are having fun and learning to move in harmony. In the partnership of a dance, one partner leads the other follows. In many dances the leadership revolves and with experienced dancers it is hard for others to tell who is leading and who is following...
It can be the same with facilitators and those working with them. Questioning and listening, leading and following.
Questioning and listening skills are probably the most important skills of the facilitator. Through these primary communication skills so much is discovered and brought to light.
Socrates was reported as saying that a "question is the midwife that gives ideas birth" And he has forever become associated with the art of asking questions.
If you or I read a question it is hard to do much other than start to think about it. You may not be able to under the question, but you will generally spend time reflecting on it. Facilitators use questions to provoke reactions from delegates; to start discussions, to gain facts, to elicit feelings, to draw on or expand interpretations and to assist the decision making process. Questions can be used to enhance thought, check assumptions, to confront preconceptions, to raise awareness and gather information.
There are probably as many ways of asking questions as there are of answering them, but we probably have more models and methods of phrasing questions.
Open
Closed
Elaborative
Evaluative
Probing
Naïve
Metaprocess
Rhetorical
Leading
Multiple
Sweeping
But if listening is such a key skill...what are the models and methods we could bring to bear on our knowledge or skill and so improve how our effectiveness?
Let me know your thoughts on listening
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Preferred modes of internal communication
23 June 2008
Many surveys conducted into employees’ preferred mode of internal communication suggest that the all time favourite remains face to face. Why? On that the surveys are less clear so here are some of my thoughts. Please add you own too.
- People want accurate and trustworthy information. In face to face, especially one to one, forms of internal communication they trust their own instincts with non-verbal communication to suss out the truth. This maybe why some leaders are reluctant to use face to face particularly if they are unsure of the facts or not fully committed to the message they have to give.
- People also want to be able to give feedback and be listened too; after all we are all members of the AAA; No not roadside assistance...Attention, Acceptance and Approval. Being listened to gives us a major injection of all three in one hit.
- In face to face communication, as apposed to written text, or PowerPoint presentations, the tendency is to use narrative or story telling to get our points across. Story telling has been central to communication throughout history. Stories or narratives are not fables or fairy tales they are the "case studies" of the conversation that enable the listener to experience and therefore understand. The exchange and calibration of meaning is essential with internal communication and employee engagement.
Story telling happens over the phone, at the coffee machine and in corridors as well as in organised "town hall" meetings. It is stories that get passed through the unofficial grapevine, with stories changing as they go, so it is important to feedback the grapevine with accurate and trustworthy information and that is unlikely to happen purely through the use of an internal news letter.
If internal communication and employee engagement are important to your organisation encourage your leaders to get out and have genuine conversations with people; including listening...
Why do you think the face to face aspects of internal communication remain so important?
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Five Myths of Employee Engagement
9 May 2008
Discuss the topic of engagement with Senior Managers or Consultants and the following barriers or myths often come up as reasons to be wary of taking employee engagement too far.
- As CEO/MD ~ I have to keep a tight control on the outcomes
- I am not going to have our dirty laundry aired in public
- Each stakeholder group has its own agenda and it is unlikely they can be united behind any common purpose. Self interest will always outweigh what is important for the organisation
- The more people you take off the shop floor and involve in meetings the more productivity will suffer
- The best and most effective changes are the ones designed by a few talented individuals at the top of their profession.
What other myths or barriers have you come across?
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A study by Center & Jackson
19 April 2008
A study by Center & Jackson carried out on behalf of the International Association of Business Communicators in 1995 came up with the following list of items your people most want to hear about.
- Organisational plans for the future
- Job advancement opportunities
- Job related how to information
- Productivity improvements
- Personnel policies and practices
- How the organisation is doing against the competition
- How individual jobs fit into the organisation
- How external events affect individuals’ jobs
- How profits are being used
- Financial results
This could provide a pretty useful checklist for a quick start internal communication initiative and give a sense of direction for researching the facts, information and stories that you’ll need to fill whatever media you select.
Let me know your thoughts on the above list and what else you would add or what you would take away
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Effective internal communication
15 March 2008
Effective internal communication is an essential part of a smoothly running business organisation. In the modern organisation there will be multi-channel flows of internal communication. For example one worker may request a new part/service from another team or department, with information on how to use that part or service. Communication between the two people & teams can make a significant difference to how well the new part / service is used.
What in your opinion does the effectiveness of internal communications depends on?
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