Social Capital & Knowledge Exchange: Blogging Inside the Enterprise

You may think I’ve been unusually quiet recently, but I’ve been diverting my energies into other channels, including a guest spot at Simply Communicate a site that collates advice, toolkits and templates covering every aspect of internal communication inside organisations.

Here is a taster:

Internal blogging can give us:

• The ability to get to know our colleagues as people and individuals encouraging give and take.
• An easier way of building networks of like-minded or useful people.
• An easy way to find out what colleagues are working on (and joining the dots with our own work).
• An easier way of finding out what people extracurricular interests and skills are (and harnessing them).
• The ability to scan the internal environment, take a reading of the organisation’s mood, and spot and pre-empt issues.
• An easy way to get a rounded sounding on ideas and test out theories or approaches – both by yourself by beginning to articulate ideas for the first time, and with others as a community of interest which helps to test and build the idea.

Read the full article.

Filed under: Blogging, Blogging About Blogs, Engagement, Higher Education, Internal Communications, Internet, Warwick , OU, Unipart

Twitter: is it too limited?

This is a bookmark to Mat Mannion’s post:

Twitter is not fit for (my) purpose(s)

following this twitter conversation (as best as I can recreate it):

@mathewjm Having this sort of interaction 140 characters at a time is sub-optimal, for example!!! 5:50 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to mathewjm

@mathewjm Or is it that people see a service and try and use it for something slightly different, and that’s when it doesn’t work? 5:48 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to mathewjm

@caseyleaver Which is what separating work and play would prevent, of course. The problem is getting people to start when they don’t get it. 5:47 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to caseyleaver

@mathewjm & @steverumsby That’s what I mean. Ideally colleagues could get to know each other as rounded people and :. work better together. 5:41 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to mathewjm

@steverumsby When I’m not so lazy Mainly, it needs tags but nobody can be arsed (and multi-accounts is NOT the answer) 5:10 AM Jan 20th from Twabber in reply to steverumsby

@steverumsby Whether I am here or not doesn’t change the fact that Twitter is fundamentally flawed 5:07 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to steverumsby

@mathewjm I’m not sure. I’d love to feature microblogging as part of a staff profile/directory effort. “Casey is (working on)…” 4:57 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to mathewjm

@steverumsby I know that – but lots of people don’t. Plus I am geekily committed to what I do for a living. 4:55 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to steverumsby

@caseyleaver Unfortunately there’s no way around it, think Twitter will die off when people realise they don’t care what celebs are doing 4:51 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to caseyleaver

Worrying about how to use social media when people want to distinguish between work and play. Maybe Yammer is the answer? 4:45 AM Jan 20th from web

Filed under: Blogging, Engagement, Internal Communications, Internet, Social Media, Web Geekery

Cabinet Office Employee Engagement Kit

Writing about http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/iam/engagement.asp

The Cabinet Office has put together an amazing pack on an approach on Employee Engagement (complete with survey).  The contents of this post, which is a draft of a paper that I am putting together for our Management Committee, is shamelessly stolen from the pack.

I should also add here (adhering to the Principles for Participation Online) that I work for Ofqual, the Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator, which, until Parliament passes the Children, Skills and Learning Bill, is part of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

A programme of work is underway in the Civil Service to develop a cross-government approach to employee engagement. This paper proposes that Ofqual uses the Civil Service framework for measuring and increasing employee engagement. The framework includes a cost-effective staff survey. Adopting the common approach means that we can benchmark ourselves against similar organisation including QCA who are also considering using the scheme.

• Engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year; the disengaged take 6.19 ¹
• 70% of engaged employees indicate that they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs, while only 17% on non-engaged employees say the same. ²
• Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the organisation than the disengaged. ³
• 78% of engaged UK workers would recommend their company’s products or services, versus 13& of disengaged.⁴
• 78% of highly engaged workers in the UK public sector say they can make an impact on public services delivery or customer service, versus only 29% of the disengaged. In 2006 Towers Perrin surveyed 3,000 public sector workers in the UK. ⁴

 

Employees agreeing that:	Disengaged	Moderately Engaged	Highly Engaged
I can impact the quality of our work product	29%	56%	84%
I can impact costs related to my job/unit	10%	21%	43%
I can impact the overall efficiency of the organisation	11%	30%	68%

 Being engaged is more than just being satisfied or motivated. It is having a sense of personal attachment to your work and organisation which means that you want it to succeed. Increasing engagement is achieved by making changes that positively impact on how employees think and feel about their experience of work.

Key Drivers

The key drivers of employee engagement differ between organisations but they tend to fall into the following areas of policy or practice:

1. Vision and direction – creating and communicating a clear and motivating picture of the future for employees
2. Career development – opportunities for professional and personal development and advancement.
3. Recognition – acknowledging the importance of the role each individual plays and thanking people for superior effort and performance.
4. Line management – enabling managers to be advocates of the organisation and their staff.
5. Work itself and environment – creating absorbing roles and suitable and effective work spaces.
6. Organisational effectiveness and ethics – promoting competence, efficiency, innovation and openness in everyday operations.
7. Employee involvement and autonomy – making use of employee expertise and opinion in operating and managing the business.
8. Work-life balance – allowing flexibility in working arrangements to enable employees to meet personal commitments.
9. Reward – valuing employees through a total reward package of pay and a range of other benefits.
10. Information flow and internal communication – enabling easy exchange of information across the organisation and ensuring that internal communication is regular, consistent and targeted.
11. Resources – providing employees with sufficient and suitable resources for their tasks and objectives.
12. Corporate image and reputation – being aware of stakeholder views of the organisation and maintaining a good public standing.

Critical Success Factors

The breadth of factors that could drive, either positively or negatively, engagement levels across the organisation are wide and responsibility lies across several functions, but there are a number of critical success factors:

1. Meaningful performance goals – organisational outcomes linked to employee actions
2. Building commitment and confidence – securing senior leaders’ buy-in and supporting managers to confidently involve and support their teams
3. Leading by example – willingness among senior leaders to invest time and effort in demonstrating a personal commitment to the approach and do things differently if necessary
4. Measurement-driven decisions – using robust quantitative data to decide where effort will have the most value, evaluate progress against goals and evolve the approach.
5. Thinking ‘global’ – considering all business decisions in the context of their impact on people and performance across the whole organisation
6. Employee involvement – providing opportunities for staff to contribute ideas and feedback to improve the approach, and for leaders and managers to gain insight into the needs and motivations of employees.
7. Clear accountability – defining roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for employee engagement between leaders, line managers, corporate functions and peer group networks.
8. Effective communication – regular, tailored communication to explain the benefits of the approach, acknowledge challenges, recognise the efforts of employees and update on progress.

Process

 

Taken from the Cabinet Office’s Employee Engagement in the Civil Service document (http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/iam/engagement.asp)

Although measurement is at the heart of the approach this programme is more than a staff survey. Aligning the process to the business planning and performance review can mean that information on what engages employees can be used to inform business strategies.

Recommendations

 

That OMG considers (a) adopting this approach to co-ordinating decision-making on issues related to staff, and (b) committing to improving the drivers of employee engagement. 

 

1 Gallup, 2003, cited in Melcrum, Employee Engagement: How to Build a High Performance Workforce, 2005.

2 Right Management, Measuring True Employee Engagement, 2006.

3 Corporate Leadership Council (Corporate Executive Board), Driving Performance and Retention through Employee Engagement, 2004.

^{4 Towers Perrin, Executive Briefing: Engagement in the Public Sector, 2007.}

Filed under: Engagement, Excellence, Internal Communications, Work

Citations

Writing about http://www.phwa.org/resources/article.php?id=1137

Leaver, C. (2007, May 21). Employee engagement: Linkages with the Sears model. Warwick Blog [online]. Retrieved May 23, 2007, from www.warwick.ac.uk.

On a vanity google trawl the other day I found this…. (It’s important to keep an eye on online reputation management I think!)

I have to say that I was very surprised to have my outpourings referenced in such a meticulous way. Fair play to them.

Although, when I reference, which is not as much as I should, I tend to use the University of Bath Library Citation Guidelines.

Filed under: Blog Prompts, Blogging About Blogs, Engagement, Internal Communications, Web Geekery

Non Pay Benefits: Employee Satisfaction

The other night on the train a couple of businessmen were talking in the Quiet Carriage. This would normally have unfortunate consequences, but fortunately for them they were talking about something that interested me.  At least for part of the journey.

One was Canadian and the other was Indian and they both clearly worked in the same division of a large Engineering company.  And they were talking shop.

But what they were actually talking about was their relationship with their employer.

They started off by discussing who would be filling a vacant management position, the Indian was convinced that the position would naturally be filled through internal promotion whereas the Canadian was sure that the position would be advertised and a new, and more expensive manager brought in from outside.  This concept was a mystery to the Indian who explained that culturally in India internal promotions were the normal way forward.

The Canadian then moved on to talking about senior management salaries, the fact that he got paid more than some senior managers because he had come into the company rather than working his way up and a story about one senior manager who could now not afford to retire (despite being above statutory age) as his pension had not worked out as hoped.  His view was that people who didn’t ask didn’t get and that the senior managers who had been with the same company their whole lives were fools and had only themselves to blame for their financial situation.

From there they moved onto talking about how it wasn’t all about the cash, how important worklife balance was and the Indian business man even went as far as mentioning bringing family into the workplace for employee events.  Very interesting stuff.  Most British employees, particularly those in HE, would run a mile from this kind of thing.

Juxtapose this with Linda Evans’s piece in this week’s Times Higher Education: Satisfaction not guaranteed where she argues that there is a difference between job fulfilment and job comfort and investigates the term job satisfaction.

Job fulfillment, she argues, is about your role, your relationship with colleagues and your manager etc.  job comfort is about the ease of finding a parking space etc.

This is interesting because in this instance ensuring job fufilment could be seen covering items that are controllable by your boss, or your boss’s boss, whereas job comfort items are things provided by the employer as amenities or dictated by personal circumstances (distance to travel to work)…

I never cease to be amazed how much car parking matters to people and how organisations ignore this fact.

Filed under: Engagement, Higher Education, Internal Communications

BA Own Goal – A Terminal Case Study

Writing about http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7317909.stm

And http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/heathrows-big-day-is-terminal-embarrassment-801743.html

Wow! This is a management, PR & Internal Comms case study in the making. I can see this being on the CIPR course next year…

The thing that stood out most for me though was the amount of coverage pointing to underinformed and poorly trained staff – from issue with the initial check in procedures through to baggage handling staff not knowing their way round the grounds.

And then it gets worse, failure to keep frontline customer-facing staff informed:

“Nobody really seemed to know what was going on. Staff seemed as much in the dark as we were.” (more)

“One baggage worker told the BBC the situation was “mayhem” and that the technical problems had been known about for some time.” (more)

“A BA staff member said they would have liked to be able to phase it in rather than ‘do it all at once’.” (more)

So many senior managers will tell you that staff are their ambassadors – but when you break that down it means that they want their IC Manager to inundate people with positive propaganda or that they expect staff members to magically feel ownership of the brand without working on empolyee engagement or brand values.

The simple things like making sure that staff are adequately trained, listened to (because they know more about the practicalities of their day job than you do), consulted about big decisions which affect them and constantly kept informed in emergency situations often go by-the-by.

As Himself said, he would rather have been a passenger in a three-hour queue at Heathrow yesterday than a member of BA staff at Terminal 5!

Filed under: Branding, Engagement, Himself, Internal Communications, PR, Press

Why Keep a Dog…

and then bark yourself?

Actually, a more accurate title for this entry would be “Becoming a Trusted Advisor: The Internal Communicator’s Mission” – but that’s no fun.

I remember being very taken a while ago by a presentation that I saw by Maeve Hawker from EDF Energy on the concept of proving your worth and demonstrating value – the holy grail of the professional internal communicator.

It was a full-frontal attack on the usual communicator’s whinge:

How can I get senior managers to take internal communications seriously?

And the response was, I’m paraphrasing heavily here, get off your arse and show your worth – pick an issue that’s a big deal to senior managers and make it an internal comms success.

So – off I go….

Incidentally, the occasion on which I saw Maeve was the PR Week “Engaging Intrnal Communications” Conference last April.

And I’m hoping for a similar shot in the arm in terms of inspiration and confidence from Monday’s CIPR Inside Information Conference. Sometimes a bit of perspective is all that’s needed.

Filed under: Conferences, Dogs, Engagement, Internal Communications, Work

Employee Engagement – Linkages with the Sears Model

Writing about web page http://thedesignconspiracy.typepad.com/weblog/2006/05/the_sears_model.html

Engagement is the measure of people’s willingness and ability to give discretionary effort at work.

Highly committed employees try 57% harder, perform
up to 20 percentile points better and are 87% less likely to leave that
employees with low levels of committment.
Corporate Leadership Council

How does engagement impact the performance of an organisation? According to Towers Perrin, 2004

• I can impact quality: Engaged 84% – Non-Engaged 31%
• I can positively impact customer service¹: Engaged 72% – Non-Engaged 27%
• I can positively impact cost: Engaged 68% – Non-Engaged 19%
• I am likely to stay with my employer: Engaged 59% – Non-Engaged 24%

(It’s not all about the parties, the intranet and the newsletter.)

In March and April I went to two conferences with the express
purpose of getting my head round the concept of employee engagement –
and I deliberately chose two conferences on the same subject from
different disciplines.

1. The Ark Group’s 2nd Annual Connecting Employees to the Business through Engagement Conference (HR- emphasis)
2. PR
   Week’s Delivering Motivating Messages and Driving Change Awareness
   Through Relevant Channels to Create Measurable Staff Perceptions and
   Ensure Engaging Internal Communications (PR-emphasis)*

Now, first of all I want to do a small amount in defence of PR. Good
PR from a systems approach inherantly involves two-way communications
and boundary spanning.

But good internal communications, no matter how motivating your
messages or how much you pass feedback up to managers, is only one part
of employee engagement. And while the HR bods seem to have got their
heads round this – the PR bods seem to have a long way to go.

So, this begs the question, what definitively makes up the employee experience – which leads to engagement or lack thereof?

According to Adrian Britten, Head of Colleague Engagement at the Co-Operative Group:

• Policies, Processes and Procedures
• Leadership
• Line Manager/ Management Behaviour
• Development/ Talent Management
• Reward and Recognition
• Workplace/ Physical Environment
• Job Design
• Communications
• Shared Understanding

Some additions from the Institute of Employment Studies include:

• involvement in decision making
• the extent to
  which employees feel able to voice their ideas, and managers listen to
  these views, and value employees’ contributions
• the opportunities employees have to develop their jobs
• the extent to which the organisation is concerned for employees’ health and wellbeing.

The CIPD adds the following:

• having opportunities to feed your views upwards
• feeling well-informed about what is happening in the organisation
• believing that your manager is committed to your organisation

Wikipedia goes even further:

• Employee perceptions of job importance
• Employee clarity of job expectations
• Quality of working relationships with peers, superiors, and subordinates
• Perceptions of the ethos and values of the organization

See Charles Woodruffe for another list…

So – what are the relative priorities? What’s the recipe?

At least both camps can agree on one thing: line managers are the key.

They shape an individual employees view of the organisation.

^{*Catchy Conference Title of the Year Award Winner}

^{1 – See related webpage linked at the top for the Sears Model}

Filed under: Engagement, Internal Communications

Even Though I Say So Myself (Or Hubris Comes Before a Fall)

Follow-up to Warwick’s Future: Get Involved from Casey’s Blog

We
are nearing the end of the University’s first ideas generation and
staff and student engagement process – and, even though I say so
myself, I am ridiculously proud of the effects.

I have held off writing this entry for a couple of weeks now (hubris comes before a fall) – but dammit I’m ready…

The team was small (two people), the budget was small (no special
funds have been alotted), the process was simple – but the effect has
been big.

There is a palpable buzz around campus and a sense of interest and
anticipation. Over 350 ideas were put forward, over 400 people were
invited to the discussion event and almost half of the University’s
departments put forward an official response to the Vice-Chancellor’s
challenges.

Of course, a large part of this is owing to the presence of a new
vice-chancellor – but I hope that this process has really capitalised
on the goodwill towards him…. the first 100 days…

The challenge now is getting back to people with feedback, giving
them the response to their idea. We are currently collating all the
various feedback on the ideas submitted and will begin telephoning
everyone shortly.

---

Consultation Process on University’s Future Strategy

Chronology of Events to Date
University Steering Committee approves process for consultation on the development of the University’s future strategy

• Vice-Chancellor publishes a consultation document outlining
  institutional challenges, which has been prepared in consultation with
  the Senior Management Team and subject specialists from around the
  University
• Consultation document disseminated via the institutional newsletter, Intranet and staff email list
• Copy
  of institutional newsletter received by all staff, Staff-Student
  Liaison Representatives (students) and Students’ Union Society and
  Sports Club Presidents
• Consultation process also advertised on WarwickBlogs and Facebook
• All
  Heads of Department (academic and non-academic) requested to discuss
  the aims and generate ideas by holding departmental meetings

• University members asked to submit ideas via a variety of
  means, including on-campus suggestion boxes; an online form; a
  hard-copy form in the newsletter to put in the internal post; a
  dedicated voicemail box or through their line manager or Head of
  Department at a Team or Departmental meeting.
• Over 350 individual submissions made from staff and students across the University
• Departmental responses provided by 17 departments

• Large externally-facilitated discussion event held on the afternoon of Wed 17 January (a traditionally non-teaching slot)

1. Over 400 staff and students invited, drawn equally from
   those who had made submissions; subject specialists; and the Personnel
   database at random
2. Over 250 attendees; split into seven
   groups which discussed all the submissions by topic (size & shape;
   research, education; internationalisation; campus community; region;
   income generation) highlighting recurrent themes and voting for their
   top three exemplar ideas

• A Primary Panel (composed of ten middle-ranking academics
  and administrators) has now received comprehensive notes from the
  discussions to inform their review of all the submissions against a set
  of pre-approved criteria

• Each submission has been sent to two members of the Panel along with the departmental responses

1. Each Panel member will review his or her responses and the
   Panel will meet once on Wednesday 24 January to discuss and resolve any
   areas of disagreement
2. At this stage people who have submitted ideas will receive feedback on the progress of their idea

• The Senior Panel has reviewed those ideas referred to them
  by the Primary Panel. They reviewed these ideas afresh, against the
  same pre-approved set of criteria and using the same process.

1. Each submission referred by the Primary Panel will be sent
   to two members of the Senior Panel along with the departmental
   responses and the notes from the breakout groups from the discussion
   event on 17 January.
2. Each Senior Panel member will review
   his or her submissions and the Senior Panel will meet once, on a date
   to be determined, to discuss and resolve any areas of disagreement.
   This meeting will be chaired by the Vice-Chancellor and will determine
   which ideas will be included in the University’s draft strategy.

• A presentation of the Warwick’s Future headlines was given
  for discussion at the Heads’ Forum on Tuesday 13 February and will be
  given at the extraordinary meeting of Senate on Wednesday 14 February.
• A
  subsequent presentation will be given to the University community by
  the Vice-Chancellor at an Open Meeting (potentially 28 February 1pm –
  3pm)
• The Warwick’s Future document will be discussed at
  Senate on Wednesday 14 March and updated for consideration and approval
  at Council on Wednesday 21 March.
• The Vice-Chancellor will attend Summer Term Faculty lunches in order to discuss further the finalised strategy.
• A
  high-level external-facing document will be prepared and presented to
  the Senate and the Council at their meetings in the Summer term.

Issues for Consideration

• The possibility of continuing a modified, scaled-down, ideas generation process
  The need to consider appropriate integration with the University’s financial planning process
  The creation of routes for acting on smaller good ideas not suitable for inclusion in the strategy

Filed under: Engagement, Internal Communications, Warwick, Work