Engagement... What does that mean?

Having delivered training and facilitation as part of several, varied engagement initiatives we are continuously surprised at the variation in the definitions of the word engagement among people in organisations. One person's idea of engagement can be another person's trigger to disengage.

However we have noticed that the key underlying theme for most disengaged employees is feeling unheard, under valued and even in some cases anonymous and dispensable.

Some key questions are:

What are you asking people to engage with and why?

What is it you expect to change or happen as a result of full engagement?

What are the obstacles?

How does full engagement look, sound and feel behaviourally?

How does full engagement look in terms of the business?

Does the current infrastructure of your business (systems, hierarchy and processes) allow for the level of engagement you want?

Suprisingly few people can answer these questions with any real clarity or certainty.

I have heard several responses to these questions including- employees making an effort to go the extra mile (sometimes called discretionary effort), increased interpersonal communication between employees (getting out from behind a computer screen), employees regularly sharing best practice and new ideas across departments for the benefit of the whole, increasing transparency between leaders, managers and employees, more money, more training, more time, more feedback, more communication.

As we all know most start ups begin with the energy of people and their ideas, beliefs, values and experiences. The interplay between these dynamics determines how and what will become the hard and soft infrastructures of the business. So the business is built from the bottom up with the people at the base. People (employees) are then literally creating and entangled in the processes and systems of the business as they strive to establish the product or service.

Of course once the small start up becomes a growing and expanding success it becomes about investment, stakeholders, productivity and ROI which needs organisation. This is often when new management, systems and processes get introduced and are added to what already exits but not necessarily always including previous infrastructure. Everything is scaled up and sometimes the original people, places and things that were in position when the company began become less important and in many cases, obsolete.

Often the main obstacle to engagement is that the structure of larger, established organisations are built with systems, processes, supply chains, business models, rules hierarchy and bureaucracy that employees have to fit in with. Aspects of the infrastructure and some employees embedded within it tend to ossify over time. This is particularly problematic with M&As.

One solution for laying the foundations for full employee engagement is to re-organise the infrastructure (both tangible - systems and environments and intangible-processes, rules and culture.) of an organisation around the people who currently inhabit, use and live them.

This would start with an 'idea sharing' initiative (in an environment of honesty and trust) to explore if, when, how and where people are currently bypassing existing bureaucracy, protocols, systems and processes to get through the working week. Also looking at any obstacles and opportunities for improvement based on the experiences of employees across all sectors and departments thereby opening all possible channels of communication between people at all levels.

This doesn't have to be wholesale change and replacement but just a matter of creatively 're-organising' the facts. Adapting current ways of doing things but taking cues from the employees up. The by-product of this process would be employees engaged around a shared commitment to make things work better.

Engagement in this context could be defined as both listening to employees ideas and then implementing them.

Why isn’t it Heaven on Earth

I was listening to the radio this morning and heard a man called Azzam Alwash talking. He is a civil engineer, specialising in water and seeking to restore the marshlands of Iraq to their former glory.

The marshlands were said to be the site of the biblical Garden of Eden and were supported by four rivers. I say were because in the 1990s Saddam Hussein redirected the four rivers and drained the marshes to punish the Marsh Arabs who had risen up against him. As a result the Marsh Arab’s oasis shrank to less than 10% of its original size. This destroyed the livelihoods of the people and devastated the local wildlife. Azzam grew up in the area and the way he described it made it sound beautiful. He founded ‘Nature Iraq’ in 2010 to protect and improve the country’s natural heritage and has the knowledge and most importantly the will to make this happen. My heart was lifted and then aching listening to him talk of this paradise lost.

I then began thinking about another article I recently read that suggested we have the potential technologies right now that could create a Heaven on Earth.

After watching Hans Rosling’s fabulous BBC 4 presentation it is clear that we are evolving and progressing in terms of our social and technological skills as conditions have obviously improved for most of mankind over the last 200 years. Though this has come at a considerable cost to the environment.

However we could change this situation. Not easily, but, over time certainly because the money, resources and technology exist today to clean up the planet and take care of everyone.

For example: we currently produce 300 kg of grain per head worldwide. 200 kg of grain contains enough calories to support an average sized adult for a year. Yet millions of people starve not because there isn’t enough food but because they can’t afford to buy it. It is well known that when too much food is produced it is stored or destroyed to restrict the food supply and keep prices high enough for producers to maximise their profits.

Environmental problems such as soil erosion and desertification threaten food production yet there exists a technology called hydroponic farming - growing plants without soil. Apparently the technique delivers extraordinary results when compared to traditional farming. Desalination technology could solve the world drought issues and clean energy is a real and present possibility for the future. We are seeing more and more breakthroughs in genetic research into illnesses and have the potential to understand more about human being and it’s place in the cosmos than ever before. As more and more cultures begin to communicate we'll discover the core underlying themes that could unite all people of the world.

The potential exits to integrate scientific, philosophical and religious ideas into a new way of thinking about humanity that transcends and yet includes all cultures, values and beliefs. The power of the internet makes building a global community acting in service of a shared commitment to create a better world for all within reach.

In theory the earth could be a veritable paradise.

Only one thing standing in our way.....WE the people.

Just a thought!

Alls well that ends Wells

Due to unforseen circumstances I had an empty diary today so I went online and began surfing on my bored-om, looking to ride in the ‘green room’ of a wave of inspiration to carry me through the afternoon. Fortunately the murky depths yielded up the gift of HG Wells’s last essay ‘Mind at the End of it’s Tether.

I happened upon this little beauty as I was ‘bashing’ from here to here to here to here from whence I was then animated to go in search of the essay, which I found here.


Written in 1943, it brings, according to Wells himself-

“ to a conclusive end the series of essays, memoranda, pamphlets, through which the writer has experimented, challenged discussion, and assembled material bearing upon the fundamental nature of life and time. So far as fundamentals go he has nothing more and never will have anything more to say.”

While I would recommend a reading, it’s not for the feint hearted, depressed or suicidal. Nor is it for those of a melancholy disposition aggravated by the suspicion that their life and it’s ambitions may be like a hungry grope inside a bulb-less empty fridge.

However it was written by a successful man at the end of the third act of life who had spent some considerable time thinking and writing. So he should have something of value to share.

Despite his pessimistic stance on evolution’s relentless drive to render obsolete anything that fails to adapt to change quickly enough, regardless of how beautiful, good or true, he essentially makes a case for continuing a conscious evolution. Picking up the tempo set by a blind yet instinctive conductor with an urge to drive the orchestra of life to play bigger, bolder and better. He makes a case against human beings becoming complacent and bloated by the idea that mankind as it stands (or stood in 1943) has the final truth or is the final product.

At one point Wells struggles to find a word to describe the urge to exist that began the whole process. He says ‘Power’ is unsatisfactory as it suggests 'something within' the universe and he wished to express something entirely outside. He thumbs through a few suggestions, offering: Cosmic process, the Beyond, the Unknown and the Unknowable, but finds them all to be carrying “unsound implications”.

Finally he settles on ‘The Antagonist’ which he uses to describe the unknown creative force that evoked life and has now turned against it. His scathing reflections were no doubt brought on by the horrors he was witnessing as a result of the second of two world wars and the rise of Nazism.

Anyway I won’t dissect the text any further as each should interpret the work as they find it, but I will say that I believe his final concern still holds true. And it is this:

“ It is possible that there are wide variations in the mental adaptability of contemporary mankind. It is possible that the mass of contemporary mankind may not be as readily accessible to fresh ideas as the younger, more childish minds of earlier generations and it is also possible that hard, imaginative thinking has not increased so as to keep pace with the expansion and complication of human societies and organisations. That is the darkest shadow upon the hopes of mankind.”

Having read the essay again I’m not entirely sure what he is ultimately sceptical about. Whether he fears that the universe, having started with a Big Bang, full of flowing radiant energy, dancing atoms and exploding fireworks, will ultimately wind down and end in a small fart. Or is it that mankind will ultimately be unable to realise it's full potential because of the biological, psychological and spiritual limits of the species. You'll just have to read it and decide for yourself.

If I may offer my interpretation, it is that this essay is a call to creativity. Wells was writing at a time when scientists were suggesting that after a good start the universe is now slowing down and is merely a finite, Godless, self- creating, purposeless organism, frustrated by it’s own limitations and destined for a cold and lonely end.

But this was before the Hubble telescope revealed that, far from winding down, the universe has actually been speeding up in it’s expansion since the Big Bang. It appears we’ve only just begun. New stars are being created across the length and breadth of infinity.

Yes, the struggle maybe between an infinite ‘Antagonist’ only able to express itself as a finite Protagonist for now, but that primal anxiety is the source of it’s creativity. And you never know, it just might succeed in bringing something wonderful into existence.

The more we learn about new discoveries in cosmology the more we realise the universe may be full of life bearing planets. We may then suspect that the Kosmos has a purpose after all - to produce life.

And that's something to be optimistic about.

Tom

Who'd have a charisma bypass operation?

Many of us graciously accept the fading from our cheeks of the plump, peachy shades of youth, as the trauma of our lives slowly becomes etched all over foreheads. But some people absolutely reject the idea of a sweet surrender and opt for cosmetic surgery. However, for those people who don’t want to suffer under the surgeon's knife, Botox injections offer a cheaper and faster solution to the deepening tramlines and crinkly crow's feet.




But the resulting, smooth, youthful looking skin may come at a much greater price than the just the cost of the injections. It might be at the expense of your charisma.
Everyone is attracted to somebody at sometime in his or her life and most of us have certainly experienced having an admirer - however briefly. After all, attraction is not just about physical appearance.

But how many of us would claim we have charisma?

I suspect very few. Mainly because most people don’t actually know what it is or how to find it. We just recognize it when we see, hear or feel it in other people.
After all it’s mainly famous pop stars, actors and public figures who get credited with having the magic quality of charisma. But there is growing evidence to suggest that more of us could have it than we realize.

So what is this elusive quality and why might Botox be bad for it?

Eminent psychologists such as Howard Friedman and Richard Wiseman have been studying charisma and have apparently discovered that it’s all to do with being highly expressive.

Professor Friedman of the University of California became curious about charisma in the 1980s - perhaps because of the sad lack of it during the decade of over-extended shoulder pads and the ‘greed is good’ mantra. Anyway he suspected it had to do with non-verbal behaviour so he created a test to try and find out. The Affective Communication Test or ACT for short allows people to self identify how easily they able are to express their emotions using their body and voice.

Test participants were asked to score themselves on a scale of 1-4 as to whether a statement was true or not about them. Statements similar to: “I am easily able to flirt with my eyes” or “I can easily communicate an emotion on the telephone.” The test was designed to identify whether someone was a high or low expressive person. In other words, were they able to unambiguously express emotions so that people around them could recognize what type of mood they were in.

After testing a random group Friedman and his team then paired two high-scoring individuals and invited them to sit in a room together with a pair of two low scorers for just two minutes. The subjects were allowed to look at each other but asked not to speak. After the experience they were invited to complete a questionnaire about how they felt during the experiment.

In every case they discovered that the low scorers had been affected by the mood of the high scorers, demonstrating that the presence of an expressive person communicating an emotion, even non-verbally, is powerful enough to have an affect on others. However the low scoring, less expressive people had little if no affect on the high scorers.
Friedman called this effect ‘emotional contagion’.

If we combine this with some interesting, recent studies of leaders in business we can begin to understand how emotion and charisma are linked.

Research conducted by two pairs of psychologists, Cote and Saavedra (2005) and Bono and llies (2006), came to similar conclusions by observing leaders interacting with their people. This body of research demonstrated that leaders considered to be charismatic transmit their emotions to followers more effectively, compared with non-charismatic leaders. Charismatic leaders were also observed to be able to literally change the mood of their employees merely by walking into a room. Their mood was communicated by the power of their presence and became contagious in a very short time.

So what was going on? How was the mood being communicated?

The answer may be staring us in the face.

Charles Darwin was the first to seriously study how our faces reflect and communicate our emotions and his work continues to influence contemporary thinkers in the field.
In the 1960s San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman found that facial expressions do in fact indicate a person’s emotional state and are present in early infancy. Even a person born blind has the same facial expressions as someone who is sighted because facial expression is not simply learned it is hardwired into the brain and is universal in nature. Ekman discovered that many human facial expressions are common to all races and cultures around the world. In fact animators have utilised his findings and theories of ‘facial coding’ to make animated characters' faces appear more human.

Dan Hill is a psychologist working in the field of micro gestures and how they express and reveal emotions, particularly in the area of facial coding and eye tracking. He is interested in the science of emotions and how that might apply in the commercial market place of advertising. Hill says that the whole face is the window to the emotions not just the eyes because the 43 key facial muscles are attached directly to the skin of the face; therefore any spontaneous flickers of movement can easily be detected. Even though these movements are small and very quick we humans are natural, facial coders and can read what mood a person is in by their the micro facial gestures. In fact we rely on them particularly when verbal communication becomes confusing and difficult. Apparently we humans make our decisions emotionally but justify them rationally.

Nicholas Rule, a psychology professor at Tufts University, co-wrote a paper called "The Face of Success" which was published in the journal, Psychological Science, detailing his findings around people who were asked to identify successful, charismatic business leaders simply by looking at photographs of faces.
The study revealed that the test group were able to accurately guess levels of competence, dominance, likeability and trustworthiness just by looking at their facial expressions.
All this evidence seems to suggest that our ability to express emotion is in large part dependent on our facial expressions. If we have a few deep wrinkles then surely that must mean we have very expressive faces.

If the eminent professors are right then wrinkles equal, high emotional expression, which equals charisma. So we should proudly and without fear grab the magnifying mirror and take a good, close look, since the more wrinkles we have, the bigger our charisma.In which case having Botox injected into our faces is surely the equivalent of having a charisma bypass.

Pass me the sun lamp.

Tom

Engagement and Innovation

Well it’s 2011 at last and many of us are in for some big and perhaps unforseen changes. So keeping motivated, energised and engaged will be top of most people’s lists as we face the personal and professional challenges ahead.




Last year the employee engagement situation in UK businesses looked like it needed attention with the latest Gallup Engagement Survey revealing that only 24% of UK employees are engaged with their jobs. Also an online study of 2000 organisations by the Hay Group revealed that HR managers now rate employee motivation and engagement as their number one concern. But there is also research showing that less than 20% of managers have received any training in engagement skills or how to bring out the best in their people.

So if this is where we are even before things start to get really rough what are we to do?

Anyone that knows us and the work we do will be aware that we approach communication, connection and creativity from 4 perspectives of human being: Physical, Emotional, Intellectual and Motivational (values, ideas and beliefs)

That’s why we became interested in a survey by the CIPD measuring engagement.

Their research suggests that engagement has three components:

• Cognitive engagement - focusing very hard on work, thinking about very little else during the working day.

• Emotional engagement - being involved emotionally with your work;

and

• Physical engagement - being willing to 'go the extra mile' for your employer and work over and beyond contract.


In this survey only 31% of employees who responded were found to be cognitively engaged, and 22% were/are actually disengaged.

Scores for emotional engagement were higher with 58% of people reportedly emotionally engaged with their work and only 6% emotionally disengaged.

And finally 38% of employees were physically engaged with their work, whilst 11% were/are physically disengaged.

So for us that leaves one componant (or dimension) missing.

Motivational engagement – Our personal values, beliefs and drives that generate the energy to engage with life and work.

Arguably the most important dimension of all as our motivation is indelibly linked with our emotions and the way we feel day to day.

Research into engagement has revealed that the emotional climate in an organisation has a profound affect on engagement. In fact it has been suggested that ‘Climate’ (or atmosphere in the workplace) is responsible for 80% of the negative or positive effects on engagement.

Simply put, people enjoy working with and for people who are positive and make them feel valued, heard, involved and cared for. This means open and honest communication between employees, managers and leaders in order to build rapport and allow people to share ideas, have them heard and maybe even rewarded.

This includes celebrating peoples successes however small, showing team members appreciation and ensuring people have the skills and resources required to achieve their expected professional targets and goals. Sounds simple enough but tricky to implement when so few people in leadership positions (according to studies) are trained in the behaviours of engagement.

Yes we know all this! I imagine many people reading this are saying.

But the figures suggest that though many of us understand what's needed, it is still not happening.

So, we'd like to propose a fairly straight forward solution, but it is one that requires considerable effort.

A key behaviour of engagement that anyone can develop is listening skills. Most of us like people to listen if we have something to share and if we are listened to we will feel more 'engaged' with the person who is making the effort to listen.
Not only that but if the person actually hears our point of view and acknowledges the value in what we say our engagement quotient is likely to increase.

So here's our contribution to the minefield that is people engagement and it begins with implementing an 'Idea Sharing' initiative across an organisation and at all levels of the hierarchy. Creating an opportunity for everyone to be listened to and hopefully heard.

In fact we have been doing this for some time now in our work with creativity and innovation and have discovered that while people ‘brainstorm’ around a product or service, other issues nearly always emerge and reveal suprising insights.

For example: say we are looking to help a team develop a new product range that builds on something already existing.

Our approach is always to begin with the facts about the current product and overall context in which this product exists and into which the new product will potentially follow. This means we take a multi perspective look at the product idea and the context in which it will appear. This will include all the Physical aspects (packaging, texture, ingredients, ergonomics etc) the Emotional impact of the style and branding for customers and employees alike. The Intellectual dimension - where does it fit culutrally and philosophically and what needs does it meet outside the obvious? And finally Motivational - how, why, where and to whom will it become most important?

To do this we work our way through a number of processes we have developed that utilises several tools to surface ‘values driven’ thinking styles. This means that we tap into the values and drives of each person attending the session in order to get a unique perspective on an issue. (I won’t go in to this here as it is fairly involved but please feel free to contact us if you want to know more).

What is interesting about this particular approach is that if you thoroughly explore an idea from a values and drives perspective you will discover more than you expected about unexpected aspects of your business.

During our sessions we often discover that some people in organisations have ways of doing things that are perhaps unorthodox and occasionally break the rules. However they are forced to adopt these methods because the organisations infrastructure ( systems and processes) impede or stultify their ability to achieve their targets and goals. However, often these ‘unorthodox methods’ go unnoticed.

How is that possible?

Because of the high levels of disengagement (and lack of engagement) in organisations today.

In other words....few people care!

But it is in these improvised, unorthodox ways of doing things that future innovations can be found and it’s becoming clear that what businesses today need are new and innovative ways of doing things.

The solution will be obvious by now.

All the new ideas are in the hearts and minds of some if not all of an organisations people. But with up to 75% of employees disengaged at work how are these ideas ever going to be discovered?

It’s going to be an exciting year ahead!

Tom