#ECTalent: Creating a Mobile, Agile Workforce

  I had thought I was going to be in China straight after my session in Malaysia, but that trip has been delayed to August so I am going to be at the Economist's Talent Management Summit on Tuesday 21 May now.  Woohoo!  (not Wuhou :-( ).

This year's event focuses on 'creating a mobile, agile workforce'.  So the Economist has clearly selected a very important, and increasingly topical, theme again.  I'll be blogging from the conference as I have done for the last couple of years but here are my top three high level thoughts on what I think should be some of the key issues to come up:

1.   Neither mobile nor agile are about technology or infrastructure but attitude and behaviour.

2.   The behaviour change isn't about replacing one set of best practice behaviours with another set of better practices, it's about clearly understanding what needs to be different and then making a small but important set of changes to align around this.

3.   Generating the desired behaviour change isn't easy.  Old traditions and ways of working are hard to change.

 

I've already posted on this last point in connection to a couple of things I'm involved in or paying attention to - eg the CIPD / MIX's hackathon, the CIPD's 100 thoughts and the Engage for Success movement.  However I've criticised the way these are being implemented* (suggesting that this is being done in a non-agile / adaptable sort of way) and I haven't spelled out how I think they should be executed differently - which obviously has a link to how mobile, agile businesses need to run as well.  So here are my suggestions:

1.   Leaders need to get out of way.  They don't need to do everything themselves, and in fact doing this detracts from the ability of followers to do things for themselves - it makes the entity (hackthon, movement, community, organisation…) less adaptable, not more.  It's not you - it's us.

• Peter Cheese / Gary Hamel - let us do the hangouts, or at least let us hangout with you and stop hogging the front page.
• Peter / your CIPD colleagues - stop making special invitations.  It makes the other contributors seem / feel less valued.  If special people can't be bothered to contribute off their own backs they're maybe not so special after all.
• David McLeod / Nita Clarke - let the movement do the presentations.  I mean give us the slides if you must, though perhaps we can all co-create them.  But let us take the movement forward.  You're over exposed, and whilst the movement's all about you, it's not able to grow.  You've already earned your OBEs - get off the stage.
• Business leaders - ask your staff about what your organisation needs, listen to them and try to do what they suggest.  And as much as possible, let them take things forward.

 

2.   When leaders intervene they need to do so in an enabling sort of way.  The role of leaders isn't to provide expert insight, it's to facilitate and encourage others to provide theirs - shaping, building on or challenging these if they need.  Their focus needs to be managing the community not providing all the content.  Wait, back off and comment when you think someone's missed a point - and nobody else is stepping in.  Or come in to recognise those you think are contributing great insights.

Now I will admit that David and Nita do some of this rather well.  Though you probably don't need to be on so many of the movement's podcasts - so spend the time helping find other members of, or people associated with, the movement to be guests, or to co-host some of the shows too.

Peter, Gary (and most of the other hackathon coaches and guides) - we see nothing.  If you can't be bothered commenting on other people's suggestions, even when they directly ask you for yours, you've missed the point I'm afraid.  Well, you both clearly understand the future of management - time to start acting like it too!

 

3.   This one is a smaller point but when you do ask for opinions, ask about what's important, and what you want really want to know.  Don't ask dumb questions! (and don't provide the answer when you do):

Eg: "Is your organisation changing as fast as the world around it?

Let's face it, for most organisations, the answer is no."

  

Err, right.  Like that's going to generate a lot of comments then!

 

4.   This one is more of a personal reflection but think carefully about who you include / exclude.  As someone who has participated in a few hackathons previously and is deeply involved in this agenda I was bound to get involved.  If I'd be invited to be a coach / guide I'd have been more likely to have got on board.

This isn't an issue for me (really - I've got lots of other things to do) but since I haven't been involved it's much easier to snark from the sidelines.  Both the MIX and the CIPD know that I'm a trouble maker (ahem!) so it shouldn't have been that hard.

That's the problem with hierarchy really - not that it naturally constrains adaptability (and implemented well, I don't think it does.)  But that as soon as you put people at the top, you place others at the bottom, and the people at the bottom are never going to feel the same way about the initiative / organisation as people at the top.

(It also makes it more important that the people at the top exhibit the very best behaviours whether that's not cheating their expenses or not abusing their status as a guide.)

 

* Note I'm a big supporter of all these things (the Engage for Success movement, the CIPD / MIX's hackathon and the CIPD's 100 thoughts) - I just think they could have been done better if they were being done in more agile / adaptable way.  And these are current initiatives focusing on creating agility and adaptability.  If they can't rise to the opportunity, what hope do our organisations have?

Well quite a lot hopefully - but I think the above illustrates how hard generating more adaptable behaviours can be.

Anyway, more on this probably from the Economist Talent Management Summit next week!

 

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Technorati Tags: agile, conference, Economist, mobile, Talent Management

Qinetiqette qits - can it be true?

 

  I don't get to spend anything like as much time as I would like to read other peoples' blogs.  But one of those that I have paid a lot of attention to for several years though, and very often talk about at workshops to illustrate one reason why we need to give more attention to our employees and candidates, is Qinetiqette.

You might have seen that I blogged on this issue in relation to Glassdoor.com recently, but it's always worth remembering that employees don't need something like Glassdoor to express how they feel about things.

Qinetiqette has been a blog written by a disgruntled employee at QinetiQ for several years, providing a caustic insight at developments in the UK's former Defence Research Agency.  Each post gets something like 30-70 comments, mainly from other disgruntled employees.  (And actually the Glassdoor reviews for the company aren't great either.)

Will this have had an impact on Qinetiq's employee brand? - absolutely.  Will it have had an impact on the main corporate brand? - yes, it will as well - despite the CEO's protestations - particularly as the blog comes third top in a Google search on the company.

Don't get me wrong - if I was the HRD at Qintetiq I would be immensely frustrated by the blog, particularly as I'm sure the reporting isn't always / often fair.  But as an external commentator it's been a really interesting phenomena to observe.

So, it's also interesting (and good or bad depending on your perspective) so see that the blog may have come to an end.  The last post (pictured above) was put up some time ago and asked for guest posts from other members of the company.  Someone commented that this was the last desperate act of a site that has passed its sell-by date.  Someone else suggested the author had been sacked.  And as of this weekend the site has been taken down.

Is this the end of Qinetiqette?  I hope at least that if it is, we'll see more author blogging on workplaces issues somewhere else.  And if they'd like to come along to the ConnectingHR unconference and share some of their experiences and perspectives on less-than-Brave HR it'd be great to see them there.

  

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Technorati Tags: employee, Qinetiqette, employer, brand

Modern HR, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

 

  Next week I'll be out in Kuala Lumpur delivering the first two days of Marcus Evans' Modern HR Week (Monday 13 and Tuesday 14 May).

 

In most organisations, top talent recruitment and retention should already be a number one priority. The real challenge will be in adjusting the strategy to accommodate changes in the workforce, thus it is critical for HR professionals and the business to develop an innovative strategy to meet the new complexities of the business world. A range of measures that provide insights on the effectiveness of talent management practices and explore the efficiency and effectiveness of the HR organisation will be vital.

Benefit from these 2 day course led by Jon Ingham during which he will bring together key knowledge and case studies in adapting and re-aligning talent strategies to develop a sustained approach to talent management. This course strives to address critical metrics to measure human capital in organisations, focusing on talent delivery and return on investment. 

I'm a bit late letting you know, but if you're  a reader of my blog based there, do get in touch and let me know - it'd be great to meet up or chat.

  

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 Technorati Tags: HR, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur

#CIPD #Hackmanagement - Hierarchical ideas dying slowly

 

  I've been thinking about posting something on this for a few weeks, linked in to my previous comments on employee engagement becoming more social.

As you may know, I'm involved in the Engage for Success movement for promoting engagement, e.g. being one of the team which host its podcast show.  I also got involved in one of the special interest groups, focusing on the future of engagement, recently.  And I was going to facilitate one of their workgroups but felt I had to back out for a couple of different reasons.  One of these was that I was planning on facilitating a session to identify the major forces acting on engagement, and how these forces and therefore the way we need to engage people, needs to change.  But it turned out that we'd already asked a number of academics to give us their perspectives and my work was to help people react to these.  I don't like this split between academic and practitioners - I think we all have an equal potential to comment on anything like engagement - and particularly on something as unmeasurable as how this may change in the future.

Even more importantly, it's a poor way to engage, so if engagement in an idea is as important as the idea itself, it makes no sense to just tell people the idea and ask for their comments - this is never going to be as compelling as getting people to input into the original idea.  Particularly when the idea is actually about engagement!

I talk quite about this with business leaders about this too.  I think the tendency is to worry about employees coming up with the wrong suggestion if they're consulted in major business or organisational decisions.  I try to remind the executives about the wisdom of the crowd i.e. that if employees come up with a decision which is different to the ones the leaders were going to have made it may well be that the employees will be right!  Plus of course, whatever the decision is, it means the employees will be more committed to it.  Better a less good strategy executed well than a perfect strategy which nobody wants to support.

Of course if executives are going to consult like this they need to be prepared to take the actions their employees suggest.  Acting on employee suggestions will be more motivating than telling employees to implement something, but telling them this will still be a lot more motivating than consulting employees for their views and then ignoring what they say.

It makes a lot of sense to me, but I'm increasingly noticing how hard we find it to do.

 

So in my last post I talked about how pleased I was that the CIPD is pursuing some actions to stimulate innovation in HR e.g. the hackathon it's running with Gary Hamel's Management Innovation Exchange (the MIX).  I also suggested that it'd got off to a poor start.  Maybe it's just me but I find being given the perspectives of a supposed expert on something (can anyone really be an expert on the future?) and being asked to comment as a lot less engaging than being given the opportunity to leap in on an equal footing to everyone else.

And why have the experts make their inputs first, meaning it is less likely for others to find space to contribute their ideas (like Gary Hamel opening up the CIPD's hackathon - surely if they really are experts, they should be in a better position to fill in the gaps once everyone else has already had their go?

There's a further incongruity in that the hackathon is designed as a forum to encourage social innovation in which people can act together to swarm and cluster around good ideas, building on these and developing them organically and naturally into new management approaches, or hacks.  So why limit this ability by imposing hierarchy on what is supposed to be social and spontaneous? Ie do we really need the MIX's mix (sorry) of mavericks, guides, coaches and hackers (which I've just noticed includes me apparently).

I also thought that innovation is supposed to come from the periphery.  This isn't Gary, it's us!

I also think that social innovation is more about social connection that it is social content sharing.  It's great to be able to share ideas on innovating HR, but if we're not connected with each other, if we don't trust each other, it's going to limit our ability to build on each others' ideas.

 

The other action the CIPD have been taking is asking people to suggest '100 thoughts' on how the profession is going to develop over the next 100 years.  I really, really like some of the suggestions in this - and plan to post soon.  But why give a 'special invitation' to supposed experts - and why give them more space to comment than everyone else?

 

The only answer I've got to these questions is that, whilst we understand the future needs to be more social and collaborative, we're still thinking hierarchically about how we create this future.

That's not that I'm set against hierarchy - there are quite a few suggestions in the hackathon about ditching hierarchy but I can't see it happening.  And I don't think we necessarily need to do so anyway.  Most of what people object to in hierarchy aren't natural, necessary aspects of hierarchy, they're symptoms of hierarchies implemented badly.  Hierarchies have a use, and, implemented well, they shouldn't stop people doing what they need to do - working sideways as well as up and down.

Hierarchical thinking is different - it serves no purpose and we need to try harder to get rid of it.

 

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 See

• http://www.mixhackathon.org/content/mix-20-real-community
• http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/social-networks-and-organisations.html
• http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/social-revolution-isnt-hierarchy-to.html
• http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/social-revolution-processes-to-networks.html

 

Technorati Tags: CIPD, innovation, Gary Hamel, management, exchange, MIX, hackathon, hierarchy

Peter Cheese CIPD Progress Update

 

  So Peter Cheese has been in post as the CIPD's CEO for 9 months now and I thought it might be time for a review of progress during this time.

That's partly because I feel a level of, well, not quite ownership or even involvement, but something a bit stronger than interest, in how this is going, having included Peter as my third out of 10 suggestions for the role back in February 2012).

I also advised Peter on five points for his new strategy when he started work last July (quite without any request for this of course, just as this review is similarly unrequested).  So I thought it might be useful?, or at least fun? to review how Peter and the institute are doing against these five things:

 

1.   Developing more focus on Strategic HR (or HCM)…

I've got to give Peter full marks for this.  I love his suggestion that the HR profession is at an inflection point - that given the changes in the world of work, the workforce and workplace, much (most?) of what we do in HR is no longer fit for purpose.  And I also love to see the way the profession has responded to this with some really revolutionary (and some counter revolutionary) suggestions for the development of the profession in this '100 thoughts' series of provocations.

I'm not too impressed with the way the CIPD's hackathon, together with Gary Hamel's MIX, has been set-up (see my comment on Gary's article, Changing the Way we Change) but I'm still hopefully about using this sort of approach to reinvent what HR does.  It's certainly a breath of fresh air that we're trying to do this now!

 

2.   …. Including more focus on Social HR

We're seeing less of this so far but there are some good early signs that Peter understands why HR needs to be more social.  (Actually I know he does as I saw him present on this at Gary Hamel's Management Lab back in 2009).

It's also good news that Peter's taken to Twitter, and I love his early tweet I've included at the top of this post.  HR's got to get to grips with dealing with communities and not just individuals.  This lies at the heart of where I think the HR profession is going to have to go.

The rest of CIPD still could be using social media before - blogging, tweeting and as Michael Carty XpertHR notes, commenting on other peoples' blogs as well (if the President of the HR Institute of New Zealand can do it, we should be able to do it to).

 

3.   Being more social itself ie more membership based

Just about top marks for this one too.  I've not seen that much of this myself, but that may just be because I'm not involved in branch events as much as I've been in the past.  But I've heard Peter talking about the need for the CIPD to be more social / inclusive e.g. responding to and including consultants rather than just practitioners, and doing more through local groups.  Great stuff - though future reviews will need to focus rather more on the execution.

 

4.   Getting rid of Bridge (spit!)

No change here unfortunately which makes Peter's intent to include consultants feel rather hollow too.  (We're not going to feel included whilst your competing with us.)

Get rid of it Peter - ideally before July!

 

5.   Developing these themes through the conference

Coming on nicely - I didn't get to the CIPD annual conference last year as I was keynoting at HR Norge, and I missed this Spring's HRD conference too, but I did follow the tweets and things seemed to be developing well:

• More of a strategic focus, though I still think there's more that we can do.

• More on social HR, but this needs much more focus still.  This is partly about more use and more talk about social media, but it's about using more social approaches too.  I thought we could have done the live hackathon at E20S better than we did, but the approach has got potential, and it'd be great to do us trying this at the CIPD conference.

• More of a social approach from the CIPD and it was great to see Peter getting some comments on his approachability.

 

So just a bit less than full marks for this area because the CIPD are still wheeling Lee Sears round their various events spurting the same nonsense about Next Generation HR (it's great to see most people in the 100 Thoughts putting forward a different type of agenda though).

In summary, great performance on four out of five of my suggestions.  I may come back with some new thoughts for Peter's second year, though I probably won't, and in case of this, here's one more suggestion for next year.

We know the average tenure of CEOs is continuing to fall and if he's not already done so, Peter needs to start thinking about succession (the institute should be role modelling good HR after all).  We really shouldn't have to be paying an agency to find us the head of our profession (as my post in February 2012 was designed to illustrate).

But given everything that I've just been discussing, can't we do this in a more strategic, social was as well.  Eg I love the way the CIPR have been asking their members to elect their new President. If we could do this for the next CIPD CEO I think we (the institute and the profession) would really be moving forward...

  

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 Technorati Tags: CEO, CIPD, Peter Cheese, performance

Brave HR / 2

  I'll also be speaking about brave HR in Eversheds' HR Summer School at Oxford University this Summer:

 

HR Confidence: Value Creation from our People Focus

We hear a lot about HR needing to be business people first, HR people second, but often HR creates more value by being different rather than the same. For example, finance’s focus on efficiency is strengthened when combined with HR’s advocacy of alignment and engagement – particularly when it comes to attracting and retaining next generation talent. John will illustrate the importance of remaining people focused post-Ulrich.

 

 

 

Maybe see you there?

 

 

 

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Technorati Tags: Brave HR, HR, Eversheds, Summer School

Brave HR

  This Summer's ConnectingHR unconference focuses on Brave HR.  So what is brave HR?

 

Today, one of the ConnectingHR community members and organisers of the unconference, Graham Frost, started a twitter conversation on what we think this thing is.  For me, three different things came to mind.

The first of these is challenging our businesses when they do stupid things.  Trust in business is at an all time low (down to 38% of people in Edelman's Trust Barometer UK results).  And employee engagement is down as well (35% in the CIPD's Engagement Index in their last Employee Outlook).  This isn't our employees fault.  Every time a business defrauds its customers or investors (by needlessly giving their money to its CEOs); every time it finds a way round regulation or avoids paying appropriate taxes; every time it colludes with its competitors; every time it contaminates our environment; every time it treats its employees as dispensable assets, it turns people off business.  That's business in general and this business in particular.  And it needs to stop.  HR can and should play a role and possibly a leading role in this.  The tendency however is to collude with other business leaders and we need to be braver to speak out.

 

 

Also see:

• Engaged or Entwistle
• HR's Spineless Response

 

The second aspect of brave HR is not being confined by a business agenda.  We're becoming so conditioned by the need to support the business but we can often create more impact by making our businesses better fit for our people than we can be aligning the people with our businesses.  It may not make us popular to say this but for me it needs saying...

 

 

Also see:

• Double Loop Learning and HR Business Partnering
• People are More than Just Cogs in the Wheel

 

This then led me onto thinking about what I think is the best articulation I've seen recently of how businesses as a whole need to change.  This is from John Mackey at Whole Foods Stores in his presentation at the Concious Capitalism conference this year.

Mackey talks about How businesses need to do more than earn money in the same way that other professions such as teachers and doctors aren't just focused on what they do to earn money.  And I wonder is this should be the case for HR?  It's certainly true, linked to my first point above, that we should encourage a more conscious approach in the businesses we work within.

But linked to my second point, should our profession focus on more than just helping business?  In an individual organisation, probably not - we need to focus on helping that organisation do whatever it is attempting, though we can certainly encourage a long-term perspective to this eg investing in local communities because otherwise the business eventually won't have any communities to operate within.

But as a profession, there's certainly an opportunity for us to be concerned about things like tackling youth unemployment; meeting future skill needs; providing compelling work and careers; and developing greater social mobility more than we are.  I think this would be brave HR as well.

  

 

Also see:

• Whole Foods: Conscious Capitalism
• Human Centric Recruiting
• With Demos on Social Mobility

 

 

Want to know more?  Come to the Unconference!  You can also join the ConnectingHR community at connectinghr.org.

 

  

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Technorati Tags: Brave HR, ConectingHR, unconference

What is Social HR?

  I'm not normally very good at remembering to send posts to HR Carnivals, but this month this is being done by Anita Lettink who I think generates some very interesting ideas for HR, so it's one that I particularly wanted to enter into.  Oh, and it's on Social HR, which is also where I seem to be spending most of my time these days.Anita says the carnival was triggered by a post from Paul Taylor at Bromford on 'how social is your CEO?' and has therefore invited contributions on 'how social is your HR?'.

 

I'd like to deal with he social CEO first.  This is something I've spoken about previously and I also linked to another recent post on the subject in the Social HR community:

 

For me, the key issue isn't whether your CEO is on social media.  They may want to be, they may not. The choice depends on a lot of things including them and their priorities and the culture of the business, etc (I think Paul expresses it very well too).

And OK, it's not going to help if they ignore their social tools completely but I don't think they need to feel that they should be using them extensively.  Now they do need to connect with their employees, and they probably need to be quite 'social' to do this.  But the biggest issue for me, and I believe for lots of people these days, isn't whether a CEO is using social media.  The big issue generally today is their reward.

If a CEO is on 354 times the average employee they're simply not going to connect with other employees.  They can tweet all they like but they're just not going to be able to connect.  It's why I thought Lord Wolfson's actions last week to distribute his £2m bonus to Next's employees was such a great thing to do.  Now he's a social CEO.

 

That then leads us onto social HR.  And this, again, I don't think is just or mainly about social media.  And although there will be exceptions for most HR Directors social HR isn't going to be about the size of their own rewards.  Instead it's about how they're injecting social approaches, and looking for social outcomes, in their people management and organisation development work.

If you want to understand more about what social HR looks like - and that includes the broader 'being social' elements as well as the use of social media, for each process in the employee lifecycle, and beyond, they stay tuned in the Social HR community as I'm going to encourage some discussions on each of these processes there.

 

However, there is another difference between the CEO and HR.  Some of social HR is normally going to be informed through the use of social media.  It's also the newest element of social HR for many people and organisations.  It's one that can go badly wrong if mis-handled.  And it's the area where there is the greatest and fastest change.  HR does need to understand and sponsor social media.

For a CEO I don't think this is that important.  For HR, it is.  We need to be using social media ourselves, as practitioners and as functions.  And we need to be using it socially - for connection.  And we need to be using it where appropriate to support our HR processes too.

But the key thing is that we need to be using it ourselves - as this will help us understand these technologies' opportunities and limitations.

 

There you go.  Oh, and I know I've not really addressed Anita's question about assessing how social your HR is.  But before we can assess this we need to understand what we're measuring ourselves against.  And I hope I've explained why, for me, this is about being social, and perhaps using and understanding social media ourselves, and not just about incorporating social technologies into HR.  That's why the HR Carnival remains important and relevant too.

 

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Technorati Tags: Social HR, social media, Social CEO

#SEEngage #E4S: Tailoring the Engagement Survey

  I mentioned in yesterday's Engage for Success radio show that I was looking forward to today's Employee Engagement Summit with Symposium Events.

It's been a varied conference with quite a bit of input from Engage for Success (David Macleod and Nita Clarke presenting once again), quite a bit on values and a fair amount on surveys.  For example Geoffrey Matthews who has just written a book on engagement with Linda Holbeche, 'Engaged' presented 10 warning signs to avoid engagement surveys being a bottleneck vs breakthrough.  You can see these described in an article at HR Review, managed by the Symposium people.

I don't disagree with any of these 10 points but I still think it's the design of engagement surveys which is key.  That's particularly the case as it becomes easier to understand engagement levels on an ongoing basis through semantic analysis of enterprise social network conversations, or through simple mobile tools like Joel Cheesman's Morale.Me, or other oil technologies like Thymo Metrics (I came across today).

I've already blogged quite a bit on formal engagement surveys and suggested the most important requirement (which I think becomes more important as other informal tools become more popular) is the linking of satisfaction and engagement, i.e. activity and outcome.  However I've also suggested that we should actually broaden out from engagement into other areas of organisational capability, e.g. things like confidence too.

Increasingly however, I've become convinced that a major key to engagement, and therefore to engagement surveys too, is to tailor the outcomes i.e. the type of engagement we're asking about to the specific capabilities of the organisation.  I posted about the importance of this in terms of raising engagement yesterday (point #2) but didn't develop the argument through to discussing engagement surveys.

It means that if a company's key capability is about innovation, it's outcome questions about engagement need to include the standard stuff about retention and advocacy but should also focus in on generation of ideas, participation in innovation processes, quality of weak ties etc.  If the capability is about speed of execution, the engagement questions should focus on speed of response, flexibility, focus on priorities etc.

To me, it's this tailoring of engagement surveys which is, or should be, our greatest priority currently (in terms of survey.  And I do agree with Geoffrey that it's what comes after the survey that's important.  But a well designed, insightful survey starts those actions off much more effectively than can otherwise be the case.)

 

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Technorati Tags: Employee engagement, Engage for Success, survey

The Economist's Talent Management Summit and the new rules of Employee Engagement

 

  One of my favourite conferences is the Economist's talent management summit which I spoke at last year and this blog has been supporting for three years now (see my competition to attend and blog for me at this year's event).

As usual this year there'll be the normal range of great quality sessions.  For example, one I'd be keen to see is Data and Smarter Decision-Making: Making Analytics Work for Your Business featuring Marlon Sullivan from Abbott Laboratories and Matthew Jeffery now at SAP.  That's partly because Matthew is always such good value but mainly because I think the link to decision making is the common missing link in the big data agenda.  Data analysis is only useful if it informs better decision making and I think we often forget this fact.

But I thought I'd post on one of the other sessions which is with Jean Martin from CEB on the New Rules of Engagement.  That's partly because it's a topic I've been presenting on myself recently and have been meaning to post on for some time.  So I don't know what Jean will say, but for me the new rules (I'd prefer guidelines) are about:

 

1.   Prioritising engagement - understanding that it's important, and will continue to increase in importance, as more and more organisations compete on their culture / organisational capability and which needs to include at least an element of engagement.

2.   Investing in engagement - acknowledging that engagement is difficult to achieve as although there are simple things which can be done, they're mostly not simple things to do on a continual basis.  And also because not all of these things are simple anyway.  Engagement should always be engagement to do certain things (engagement in innovation needs to look different to engagement in speed or efficiency) and understanding, articulating and building an environment around these specific connections generally isn't that easy to do.

These first two 'rules' aren't necessarily that new, but they are certainly now more of a requirement.  Whilst engagement was a new and less important concept it was probably enough just to focus on doing the basic management essentials well. That's no longer enough today.  We need to understand much more clearly what engagement needs to look like within our own particular organisations, and see developing what's required as a key strategic requirement too.

 

3.   Making engagement more human.  We used to be able to ask for peoples' engagement simply to support business needs, or because of our hierarchical position of authority.  That doesn't work these days.  Instead of this, we need to focus on developing personal relationships as the basis for engagement.  People will increasingly engage in supporting us if they want to support us as individuals - not just because they want to achieve certain business needs.  This shift is making the belief that managers lie at the centre of engagement ('people join organisations but leave managers') even less true.

4.   Accepting challenge is engagement.  Another change has been in moving away from wanting everyone to line up behind us.  This never worked that well anyway.  But increasingly asking for this unthinking compliance just turns people off.  Employees may still keep quite and line up, though increasingly they won't (they'll just blog about you instead).  What works these days is to present arguments, have conversations and to try and bring people on board.  But if people still don't agree then we need to accept this.  This challenge and conflict is still engagement (it's the silent cynical compliance which is non engaged).  This doesn't stop us having people working to the same plan, but it certainly alters the dynamics involved in getting to this.

By the way, I think a really good example of what I'm writing about here comes through from the government's actions in the NHS post the Mid Staffs debacle and in particular the banning of gagging clauses to silence whistle blowers.  Take this quote from Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt:

 "There has been a culture where people felt if you speak up about problems in the NHS you didn't love the NHS. Actually it's exactly the opposite.

 

Criticism is positive you see - but I don't think that's the way we tend to think about engagement now.  So I do think these last two 'rules' are new, and it'll be interesting to see whether they come up at the Economist's event.  Are there any other 'rules' that you'd add, or do you agree / disagree with mine?  

Hopefully we'll get some input here from Jean's presentation at the Talent Management summit too...

 

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