Take a look at the image below – does it look familiar to you?
The Results?
- Dwindling response rates
- Lack of buy-in
- Cynicism, low trust
- No real change achieved
- Low ROI
Is it time for a change?
It’s a slide we often use at events, workshops and training – and it’s fair to say it’s not going to win any awards for great design! But…. it always gets a reaction, every single time. The message on the slide is very powerful, and one that most engagement practitioners can relate to. The story goes something like this: you do an engagement survey, get the results, and pick the bottom scoring areas to put into the action plan. Then some poor person, usually in HR, has the job of collating the actions, often in a spreadsheet. This task often involves chasing managers to submit their actions. And finally everybody breathes a collective sigh of relief when the survey and action planning is over for yet another year.
The result? Well, any promised changes disappear into a black hole.
This may sound harsh, but over the years I have spoken to hundreds of practitioners for whom this is a common experience. The irony is, that approaching engagement in this way is about as disengaging as it gets. This is certainly where I was when I worked in-house. I’d had responsibility for engagement (lets face it, back then that meant the survey) for a number of years. And after going around this cycle many times, I finally woke up and decided there had to be another way, a better way to improve engagement and how it feels to work in organisations.
This approach to engagement just wasn’t working . Vast sums were paid to deliver research and yet nothing was actually changing for the better. And as the years went by, I saw cynicism increase at survey time, which is not surprising given the lack of impact. So I started looking for a different way to approach engagement, and by chance I read an article about a technique called Appreciative Inquiry. This completely changed the way I approached employee engagement and has informed my work ever since.
What is Appreciative Inquiry (AI)?
Don’t let the name put you off! The concept of AI was originally developed by Dr David Cooperrider, Dr Suresh Srivasta and Dr Frank Barrett, at Case Western Reserve University. Essentially AI is a simple, strength-based philosophy and approach, which argues that there is just as much to be learned by understanding what works, and what could work in various situations, instead of always focusing on all that is wrong and how issues and problems can be fixed. When I first came across AI, I immediately recognised the potential of this tool for developing engagement. I recalled various meetings and workshops on engagement that I had attended over the years, where the conversation had started by looking at everything that was wrong and how we could fix it: this approach felt counterintuitive to developing engagement. On discovering AI, I wondered what might happen if we started a conversation by understanding what actually works, and what engagement looks and feels like for our people.
In a nutshell, taking this approach to engagement involves conversations about what good looks for people when they are at their best and when they are engaged. Once we understand this, we can focus our efforts on creating a place to work where we can bring this to life. When you take the time to find out what good looks like for your people, the results are often surprising. I’ve collected 1000s of ‘best experience’ stories over the years and not once has anyone ever mentioned pay, bonus, great office, good tech, their own parking space etc. Instead, what does get talked about is far more intrinsic; being valued, having autonomy, progress, a great boss, a thank you.
I first used this approach back in 2005 and it delivered some amazing results, not least a reduction in employee turnover of 28% in a year, and sales increases of over 60%. I have used it since with hundreds of clients, all over the world such as Virign Atlantic, Experian, Canal River Trust, Barclays, and it delivers every single time:
- Improved EE index from 24% to 89% in 12 months
- A movement from -14 to +28 net promoter score
(customer advocacy) in one year - An increase in engagement survey response rates
from 50% to 94%
If you think its time for a change and would like to find out more about this ground-breaking approach to engagement get in touch today via our Contact Us page here.
