Employees will choose to give their effort to what has meaning for them; an individual experience that leads to collective impact. Engaging employees means involving and inspiring them so that they decide to do something different as a result.
Engagement techniques
Why do most strategies fail? Apart from macroeconomic factors beyond the company's control, it is the dearth of time spent on engaging the very people who are employed to deliver those strategies. Employee engagement, rather than being a discretionary activity run out of HR, is therefore a key enabler of strategy execution.
We concentrate on joining top down intent with bottom up contribution, to produce a 'best of both' more likely to make the strategy work.
Talent management
Talent management too often defaults to picking out and cultivating a few favourites. In our view, 'talent' equals the strategic capability of an organisation, i.e. the resource it most keenly needs to mobilise in order to deliver its strategy. The implication is that talent is for all, not just for the few, and it is the role of leaders to create organisational conditions in which the potential of all can be realised.
We start with the company's strategic ambition and work back to the capability required. If that capability delivers the strategy, it is by definition talented.
Strategic communication
Communication can be a backwater of organisational life, hived off to comms professionals who, for all their talents, have lost the connection back to the business. What's more, the old-fashioned distinction between external and internal comms is maintained like the Berlin Wall.
Strategic communication, by contrast, starts with the company's business aims, and translates them into simple, clear messages that flow across the organisations boundaries.
Case studies
Using bold approaches to engage the wider system
The Challenge NHS Live started as a creative idea for a communications event and evolved into an ambitious programme for cultural change that underpins the strategic priority to create a more patient-centred NHS. Sponsored by the Department of Health, it is co-funded by a carefully selected group of private sector... Read this case study in full More case studies on Employee engagement
