Review of Engaging for Growth 2011

Sustainable Employee Engagement and Organisational Effectiveness – How to go about it?

Organizations with highly engaged employees are significantly more profitable than their competitors with low engagement.  In the current economic climate, employee engagement seems to be the key ingredient that determine whether your organisation thrive or barely survive.  But do you know exactly what steps you could take today to increase employee engagement? 

“Engaging for Growth 2011” organised by The Focus Group set out to answer this question.

With an impressive selection of speakers from public and private sector as well as academia, there was something for everyone. It was like having a private consultation with one of the world’s foremost experts on employee engagement.

Learning about cutting edge strategies and trends, finding out what works and what does not, opportunities to work through your own engagement challenges whilst having leading experts available to answer your questions and opportunities to network and learn from others are just some of the benefits of attending.

The conference started with the engaging and inspiring overview from David MacLeod on how to create work conditions where people want to give more. Next up, Anthony Thomson, chairman of Metro Bank plc talked about creating fundamentally different banking environment where customers are seen as fans.

After lunch Dawn Hawins gave an inspiring account of challenging yet possible task of engaging employees in public sector, using job re-design as a strategy and its power to transform the employee attitude to work, so that “it does not seem like work at all”.

Nick Iles the Global User Experience Director at Unilever shared the learning around measuring employee satisfaction emphasising that the survey is just the beginning of the process; not the end as some organisations may think. He also revealed the simple yet powerful tip on how to raise survey responses rate from 10% to 45% with a 25 second video invitation.

These messages were then topped up with William Montgomery’s individual perspective on engagement through developing leadership potential and measuring happiness index.

The second day started with Martin Reddington’s review of cutting edge techniques on Organisational Effectiveness and Employee Value Proposition. This mixture of academic and practical perspective was followed by a workshop facilitated by industry experts from KPMG. This was an opportunity to look at some common issues, developing methodology and concrete propositions that can facilitate change.  Alice Bretherton also revealed KPMG’s own Global Engagement Strategy, sharing the successes and the challenges that KPMG faces.

Examples of successes and mistakes were also shared by Dominic Boom - the Head of People at Virgin Active. Dominic has revealed some simple strategies that lead to dramatic reduction of employee turnover from 64% to 32% within one year, which resulted in a 14% rise in revenue.

Next up, Paul Allen from Telefonica Europe presented the business case for linking Employee Experience and Organisational Effectiveness and how to take people with you on the change journey.

The conference ended with a powerful, eye-opening session giving the projection and prediction for the next 10-40 years to come; not only around environmental sustainability but also technological advancement, as well as social and demographical trends. One take-away from the presentation was that “by 2050 we not going to commute to work any longer - we are going to communicate”.

Nevertheless, the value of the conference was very well summarised by one of the delegates at the end of the first day:  “I already wrote half of our new engagement strategy while sitting here, of course the other half has to be done with involvement of our people”.

The importance of effective Employee Engagement strategy is well understood: the clear definition and how to do it effectively is still very much evolving. But one certainty is that “one size does not fit all” and organisations need to consider their individual challenges when selecting the most effective engagement strategy. Engagement for Growth Forum created the perfect opportunity to do so.

If you missed this year’s conference contact The Focus Group to find out how you can catch up on some of the highlights but if you really want to gain maximum benefit just make sure that you there for the next one.

Dorota Karas –Business Psychologist