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THIS WEEK
How to engage employees and clients in your business
ALSO IN THIS EDITION
How to engage employees and clients in your business
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This week my mind has been focussed on the concept of engagement, or "getting people informed, involved, committed and motivated to act, to achieve the organisation's purpose and future directions" (Dennis Turner, 2003).
What has become apparent over the past decade is that the ability to create engagement is one of the most crucial leadership skills. Without engagement, new initiatives fail, people leave and remaining people are demotivated. Without engagement, customers don't buy and don't refer new business your way. Without engagement, businesses die.
You can see when people engage with your business or product. Their eyes sparkle, they talk with all their colleagues about how great you are, they give their last drop of effort to do whatever is needed for you. When they disengage, they don't care what results they get. If they have to remain, they disrupt people around them and block all attempts at change.
So how do you get people to engage? One of the best and most meticulously researched works on change was written by Professor Dennis Turner and Michael Crawford. Called "Change Power: Capabilities that Drive Organisational Renewal", this was one of the first times that scientific rigor was applied to trying to work out what capabilities businesses needed just to survive, and what they needed to reshape or deal with change.
Engagement was shown to have the strongest impact on the success of change whether:
- The organisation was large or small
- Is in the public or private sector
- The organisation faces an opportunity or a threat
- The potential impact of the change is minor or major
- The change is swift or protracted
- The change occurs with little warning or not
- The business strategy being implemented is to reorientate into new areas, refine or improve its operations, introduce new developments or contract the business
- The focus is on changing the corporate culture or changing the top management.
In other words – no matter your business size or type, or the nature of the change, you need to have engagement to have it work.
I was lucky enough to have Professor Turner speak with a number of my organisations over the years, and his research and approach still stands up over a decade after it was first released.
In the book, Turner & Crawford suggested that the competencies a business needs to create engagement are:
- Communicating throughout the organisation on all matters relevant to people and their work
- Achieving widespread commitment to carrying out decisions
- Motivating and enthusing members about the organisation and their work
- Integrating and coordinating action
- Pathfinding – developing, crystallising and articulating new directions to achieve the organisation's purpose
- Taking timely and effective action, not just planning and talking about things.
There are many different ways to do this in practical terms – but you need to exercise most of these competencies if you really want change.
One of the ways to do this is via a simple checklist. Whenever you need to implement change or build engagement, ask yourself what are two or three most important actions you could take to increase communication, gain commitment, motivate people, integrate action, crystallise and articulate the pathway, and get action happening. The discipline of thinking through actions will dramatically improve your success rate.
The trick is that you need to pay attention to creating engagement. You cannot simply act and expect people to follow.
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| HR Tip of the Week: Practical Actions to Boost Engagement |
If you need inspiration on actions that are possible to boost engagement, then look at examples of other businesses doing it well and draw from their experience. Of course you need to adapt their best practice to what would work in your organisation with your culture and your challenges, but getting ideas from the best never goes astray.
Rather than give you a traditional set of examples, today I thought I would share a very left field example - a high school music program and how they engage teens into non pop music based program (sounds like many businesses - trying to get employees to engage in things outside their comfort zone).
Here's a link to download an article from the Music in Action journal where a music department head talks about the actions that they have taken to create strong youth engagement in their music program. (Article reproduced with consent of the Editor).
Actions are as diverse as "open-door" staffroom (most traditional schools would have panic attacks at allowing students to call staff rooms theirs), breaking bread together, parental input, past student's involvement, mixing of age groups, emotional dimensions, making the right connection and building community.
These wonderful creative actions can be easily adapted to any workforce or business. Take some time to read about these practical actions and have a think about how you could apply these to your workplace.
The book Change Power by Professor Dennis Turner and Michael Crawford is a management classic. It also as rare as hen's teeth, so if you want to learn more about business performance, change and renewal you need to do some hunting to track it down.
In the book, you will discover the background to their research, the methodology used, as well as highly practical capabilities that top organisations and people possess.
It covers the 5 key capabilities needed to manage an organisation for long term performance (marketing & selling, performance management, biztech, engagement and development). It also highlights that the capabilities to manage change and renewal are very different to those needed to achieve high current performance and that you need both sets of skills for long term performance.
This is one of those books that is not a "fad" book, just one with practical wisdom presented in a way that you can do something with the information. For this reason Change Power deserves a place on your management bookshelf.
Listening to many lectures on latest psychological research you could be excused for thinking you were listening to tapes designed to help you sleep. Except for this one. This brilliant video looks at why money does not work as a motivator, but does it in a way that totally engages you right to the last second.
exuberantly yours
Ingrid
Heart Harmony
Legal stuff: This newsletter is intended as only a general guideline for Australian businesses. You should seek specific advice for your situation rather than relying only on this newsletter
Earnings disclaimer. Some of the content may include advertorial information, which means I may receive financial compensation for the products I recommend. But - unless I know and trust the product, I will not recommend it.
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