Warning! Long blog post alert, do yourself a favour and grab a cuppa first.
Background
As regular readers will know I’ve had an interest and involvement with the EE Taskforce since I (and of course many others) contributed to the original Engaging for Successreport. This report got kicked into the long grass partly as a result of the sponsor falling out of political favour. Behind the scenes, the authors David MacLeod and Nita Clarke persuaded David Cameron to take another look and so on March 29th 2011 amidst some fanfare, the plan was relaunched.
I was cynical about the relaunch and wrote about it here. Coincidentally, or maybe it was Sun-Tzu at work with his ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer’ approach, shortly afterwards I received an invitation to participate in the taskforce. Nice touch. Since then I’ve attended all the meetings I’ve been invited to except one which fell a couple of days after my Dad’s death (which David MacLeod has been very kind and supportive about). I’ve kept folks informed here, here, here, here and here, and all these previous posts have generated a good deal of conversation, both here and in other places too. So there seems to be some demand for news, and yet up until now at least, I’ve felt progress has been painfully slow. So when I received an invite to the one year on conference, I accepted more out of a sense of duty than with any of my usual enthusiasm.
Not in the Mood?
I made my way to the BIS offices in Central London yesterday with a sense of impending doom. I tweeted, ‘On my way to EE Taskforce. Shld I prep to be amazed, angry, disappointed or just have a snooze? One year on what will I learn?’ I received some lovely support but at the time I added ‘today will have to be good or I think I’ll quit.’
On arrival we were offered coffee and I had a chance to catch up with a few friends, I also noticed that the make up of the group looked and felt quite different this time (more on that later). Shortly after we were asked to take out places. Even though I knew this was a conference, I was disappointed at the theatre style layout. It set the scene for a lot of broadcast and very little conversation. Still, as David said, this was the first time we’ve pulled everything together to share. Today was a chance to get a sense of what is working, what gives us confidence. Where are the gaps? We need to spot them before we launch. Launch?! I thought we’d already done that. But apparently In September time there is talk of launching a national programme. My own personal belief is that engagement is not a programme, that feels too forced. For me it’s more like an environment in which we can choose to do our best work. Anyway – here come the updates, I hope they are useful for you.
Nailing the Evidence
We started with the old favourite, ‘Nailing the Evidence’. There was talk of making a compelling case to show the correlation between employee engagement and organisational performance. Linkages between profit, productivity, absence, innovation, wellbeing, customer, absence, and health & safety were shown, and yet more calls for data and case study stuff. Then we were shown loads of numerical and statistical examples of how more engagement = better stuff. So I don’t get it, surely we don’t need more evidence.
I think the continued ask for evidence shows we lack confidence. I’d like to see this piece renamed as ‘Nailed the Evidence’, so we can move on to getting stuff done. If people don’t believe that engagement is worth the effort, that’s fine. Leave them be and I think they’ll come round once the movement and momentum is obvious, that’s how most people and organisations react.
Purpose
The Taskforce has been looking for a purpose, and courtesy of Brand Union and others, we’re gonna get one! I was lifted by a mention of the ‘f’ word, fun. I use it a lot because I believe we do our best work when we’re enjoying ourselves, and I’ve yet to find an employee manual that says ‘no fun allowed at work’. Enthusiasm got a mention too. I’m liking this. We moved through the perceived need to have an expression of values, and a framework for defining tangible outcomes and measurement. I’m feeling a little less comfortable right at this point as I believe you can no more measure engagement than you can accurately predict how much longer you’re going to live.
I scribbled the values as they emerged (sorry if I’ve not got these bang on they weren’t on screen for long):
Inclusive: open to all
Practical: workable ideas for action
Accessible: connecting in open dynamic environments
What’s important now is to watch for the emerging behaviours that will either support or restrict these. I’m going to put my cautious optimist hat on for a while.
Also there is a visual identity on the way. Apparently we can’t show it yet, some legal reason or other. Personally I’m not sure about it yet – too many colours (I can recall purple, yellow, red, brown, blue, green, black and white in the palette) and clashing graphics for me. Still I guess we can be selective about that. There was also talk of standard facilitation guides and agendas. As one who prides himself on flexible facilitation you can imagine I’m not too keen on the sound of that. I guess it depends on what you want to get from a session, I think it was Albert Einstein who said ‘Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.’
People Everywhere
We were told of the legion of people currently involved. 50 CEOs (I expect their involved largely in name only), 40 sponsors 160 gurus (*puke* I remain a hater of that term) and practitioners, and many more. Whilst it is tempting to think a successful movement can be evaluated in part by numbers, I think that up to now some of these groups have been too big to allow agility and flow to occur. Importantly we are reminded that participation is voluntary, there is no money changing hands. Sure – there are companies giving resource into the mix but no direct payments are exchanged. I think that matters.
Online
There is a recognition that the web is important for connections, distribution of info. Who might visit a Taskforce website? The CEO of a SME? The FD? Comms folks? Heads of engagement? Managers? There is user testing on the website and I will offer to help and let you knwo what arises. There was talk of spreading the word through social tools (yeah I’ve gone on and on about this before I know….). Places like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. There was talk of phasing and controlling and launching. Social was made a joke of, and though I’m biased I remain convinced there is untapped opportunity here.
Something Changed
I tweeted my frustration that social was the butt of the joke, and an online conversation began. Some of the participants were in the same room as me and some beyond. And we began to share other thoughts about the day too. This was the first time to my knowledge that a Taskforce meeting leaked out into the big wide world and grew. So we ended up seeing some enthusiasm and some constructive criticism being shared with a wider audience. And I met a few people in real life who I had only previously known online, and we were able to tell this little vignette before the meeting closed. You never know, we might have even flipped one or two cynics. We’ll see,
Why is engagement vital?
Neil Carberry from the CBI spoke about connectedness being stronger and simpler than ever before, and in real life we are likely to work more remotely. A sense of engagement is necessary to help keep us all together. Sarah Veale from the TUC spoke about nothing about us without us. She talked about the bonds between society and work, and the importance of bringing our humanity to work. Sarah said it’s important to keep the conversation going, reflect outside life into work, reconcile differences and work out the togethernesses. Conversational stuff allows the difficult stuff to happen, e.g. downsizing. Respect is what it’s all about. I enjoyed listening to Sarah.
Barriers to Engagement
Stephen Dando talked about some work being done to identify barriers to engagement. So far three interviews have been done with CEOs discussing what prevents CEO from engaging. The interviews are semi structured. What is emerging? Lack of emotional connection, leadership emotional intelligence, authenticity and trust missing. Reluctance to share power. Some simply don’t believe it, some are ignorant, that is to say they don’t feel they know enough. And of course tension between short and long term arose. There are plans to carry out more interviews and hopefully we’ll engage with and get views from cynics too.
Engaging Through Adversity
Change often brings work and home closer together. Talking with each other critical through change, which currently seems to be another word for redundancy. Be patient when exploring opportunities and challenges. I like this, most people don’t do enough exploration, far less show enough patience. Mind the say do gap. Command and control outdated, so my question is why are they still common practice? Two way dialogue is critical and it goes beyond work to family, community. Uncertainty is bad, be authentic, front up personally and answer questions honestly.
Innovation, CSR and Wellbeing
These sessions really came to life. Louise Beardmore talked enthusiastically about innovation and we were shown some potentially useful tools to help people link innovative practice to behaviours. For me innovation comes with chaos and mistakes and we have to recognise and embrace that for the good stuff to survive and thrive. More on this another day.
And Stephen Lehane from Boots talked with good humour about the linkages between CSR, Wellbeing, engagement, customer conenctedness and good business. As a CSR practitioner in a previous life I’ve always seen this stuff as a vital part of the engagement mix so it’s good to see some connected thinking emerging here.
Alive!
We were then invited to turn out chairs and have a short conversation with some neighbours about what we felt is working and what needs to be done. This simple act created an abundance of energy in the room. People felt that integrating different groups in the room had worked. There had previously been a lot of siloing and I think lots of us enjoyed seeing that breaking down. Fun and humour are a vital part of the mix and kudos to Raffaela Goodby for making that vital point (I would have but I was too scared someone would laugh at me – geddit?). We would like to see more sharing, more use of social tools, better distributive leadership at work, and of course, more interaction, this last session was just so lively!
Immediate Aftermath
It’s no secret I regard myself as a critical friend of this movement, a position I’m very comfortable with. And I freely admit that on the way to the session I called it wrong this time. I left with a sense of progress and some renewed optimism, laced with concerns that some of the age old problems are as talked about and as stuck as ever.
So if you’ve made it this far – well done! And if you were at the event what did I miss? And if you weren’t, what do you think about what I’ve shared? It would be good to hear and learn from you.
