I was recently reading a story about the success of the ‘carrier-bag’ levy in the UK.
The charge, introduced by the UK government, demanded Retailers with 250 or more full-time equivalent employees charge a minimum of 5p for the bags they provide for shopping in stores and for deliveries.
I reflected on how such a small change could have such a significant impact. Simply charging us a few pence for a plastic carrier bag encourages us to remember to bring along our bags-for-life when we go food shopping. It’s only a 5p charge for the bag. We wouldn’t even notice the 30p or so charge for plastic bags to carry home our shopping, and yet this small change has promoted a reduction of around 86% in single use plastic carrier bags, which equates to over £6 billion less bags a year.
Sometimes it’s the simple things, the little things, that can make the biggest difference. In our lives we often over-complicate, and look past the obvious. If something seems too easy, or too simple, it’s tempting to write off the value it can add.
It was a simple, small change that I made to the way I approached employee engagement which has made the biggest difference to the success I’ve had over the years.
Why is it that conversations on engagement often begin with analysis of all that is wrong with our workplaces?
Strategies designed to engage employees more often than not begin with evaluating problems, looking at what erodes engagement, and then asking how can we fix these problem areas? This approach is sometimes called a deficit approach to employee engagement, and is compounded by over-reliance on the results from the annual staff survey as the starting point for action. This approach tends to take the bottom five or so areas from the survey and task managers and teams to work on these areas to improve engagement.
It’s very rare than companies look at the positive findings from the survey and ask how they can learn from this insight. This is the approach I used in my early days of working within the field of employee engagement: going around the survey cycle and focusing on trying to fix all those areas that scored poorly. However, after a few years of trying to fix the broken areas, I found that this approach wasn’t really working. Sure there would be some improvements in certain areas, but overall, whilst a huge amount of effort and resources were going into tacking the problems, the solutions just weren’t sustainable.
By chance I read an article about a technique called Appreciative Inquiry (AI), which changed the way I approached employee engagement and has informed my work ever since.
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 always started by looking at everything that was wrong and how we could fix it: this approach felt counterintuitive to developing engagement.
People left these sessions feeling fairly helpless about the current situation, overwhelmed by how much needed fixing to improve engagement. It only takes a few cycles of this approach for the organisation to develop learned helplessness when it comes to engagement. If you begin to hear phrases like “nothing will ever change”, and “here we go again”, coupled with a drop in survey response rates, you know you’re in this place in your own organisation.
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. Think it sounds too simple, and too obvious to work? In my experience AI is an incredibly simple but powerful way to get an organisation thinking about engagement. By asking people to share stories about times when they loved their jobs the whole focus and feel of the discussion is positive and optimistic.
AI is a powerful tool to use within engagement: whether using it as a framework for engagement per se, or using it to look at aspect of engagement such as promoting wellbeing at work, or authentically recognizing employees. Its power is in the fact that is encourages participants to talk about, and share, real life experiences and stories: looking at what has already worked in the past or is working today. These real life stories and experiences are a great foundation to then imagine future possibilities, which then don’t seem so far-fetched or over-whelming.
From a psychological perspective, given AI is strength based, the process itself generates positive emotions and experiences: it is an engaging process in itself. The process also sets out a clear purpose at the outset and facilitates autonomy amongst participants: they contribute their own stories and ideas and develop their own solutions.
Having a group work together to imagine future possibilities is an excellent way of both involving employees, and giving them a voice: both enablers of engagement. It also aids sense checking that people are on the same page and there is motivation to move in the same direction.
You don’t have to be an expert in AI to use this approach, it’s as simple as saying we are not only going to look at what’s not working, we’re also going to ask what good looks like too. To get you started simply download our free tool – best experience and if you’d like to know more about how AI can revolutionise your employee engagement we’d love to hear from you.
