People Manager Strategy

[Zoe Chambers]

I'm just currently staring at one blank piece of paper to start forming our people manager engagement strategy, and I have another piece of paper with loads of notes on it. We want to harness and develop the inclusiveness and engagement skills of our people managers. Here's what I'm thinking and I'd be grateful of any input!

1. Define the objective of the strategy and connect to our business priorities (specifically to employee engagement)

2. Measure and evaluate first with people managers by survey, dialogue and focus groups.

3. Define and implement tools, guidelines, communities and activities:
Example tools:
- Manager specific publication
- Manager specific face to face briefings
- Heads up on change communications with FAQs
- Targetted web chats and web casts
- Online manager network (like facebook) with blogs, wikis, libraries, articles, member photos
- Reward and recognition tools
- Goals and objectives setting and review
- Personal growth opportunities eg coaching and mentoring training, communications training, career development skills, invitation to senior leadership round tables.

4. Continuous feedback and measurement

More background:
All our managers have already attended inclusiveness training last year, so this would build on top of this.

We already have an engagement strategy and an internal communications strategy, that we will need to refresh as we are going through a triple integration right now.

[David Zinger]

Zoe:

I hope this generates lots of discussion as many people are working on related issues.

I will return and add more later but for now here is something I feel is key. Ensure that all measurement, evaluation, surveys, dialogues, and focus groups are engaging. Combine the purpose of measurement and evaluate with engagement.

Ask questions about what can be done right away. What will you do differently after these questions or discussion?

Get feedback to them as quick as possible.

Rather than big assessment I love quick assessments where results and actions are returned in one day.

I posted this video on my site today but it may be worthwhile as a reminder here. All the best with action.

[Terrence Seamon]

Great clip, David, from a hilarious movie.

Zoe,
Great question. be sure to check out the other recent thread now growing, regarding managing in 2009. Some terrific ideas there, including Mark's "one small thing" program. It's simple, cheap, and powerful.

A couple other responses to your question:

- During this "staring at a blank paper" phase, don't stare alone. Invite a few folks in and vision together.

- For the visioning exercise, ask yourselves a question such as: What would we desire this organization to be like in a year? three years?

With a positive vision of the future, you'll then be able to develop strategies for journeying there.

Terry

[Hugh Flouch]

Zoe,

There's an increasing amount of evidence that what drives engagement is effective and regular conversations between managers and employees. Helping managers get that right makes a real difference. Ci's Engaging Conversations tool is used in organisations including GSK, T-Mobile and BT.

Read the conversation gap research here.

[Zoe Chambers]

This is really helpful so far. Thanks for all your input.

[Mark Moorton]

Hi Zoe

I was much in the same position this time last year for my organisation.

I decided that my starting point was to properly understand what does this thing "engagement" really mean to us and why do we want to do it - I was concerned that, without this "knowledge", we would be in danger of "doing engagement" for its own sake and that it would be seen more as a fad than a real business proposition. We spent some time (without too much navel-gazing!) trying to define engagement for our business, understanding what makes us different from our competitors, and why people join our organisation and then what makes them subsequently want to stay. In the last two, I was determined to find something that was solid - not soft and fluffy - but a real commercially based reason. Once we had the answers to this (and we knew what they were really when we started), it helped to shape what we wanted to do in determining our vision and actions.

Mark

[Rob Fox]

Hi Zoe,

In my experience the key is to engage people in engagement - that is to engage them from the "get go" in developing the strategy themselves. The benefit is this means it is possible to ahieve high ownership from your people in the program from the outset - after all it is there program.

You might like to see www.engagingideas.co.uk for some further background on developing co-created and collaborative engagement strategies and inverventions.

Whilst at first hand this may seem more problematic than typicall "management decide people do" approaches, co-created inverventions produce richer resullts that endure, and, as they are discovered, designed and delivered by your people themselves, they have hugh advantages.

Best,

Rob
www.engagingideas.co.uk