The Wadenhoe Consultancy Ltd

"Best Companies" - Energy, Engagement & Trust

Reading this year's Sunday Times results, it is once again clear that those organizations who focus on achieving "Best Companies" recognition, do so, not as an end in itself, but as a means of raising their profile and achieving better business results through people. So why aren't more companies doing it?

In the 2009 McCloud Report on employee engagement, three interlinked "barriers" to employee engagement are very clear (and we paraphrase):

Understanding what it is.
Getting started.
Keeping it simple.

Clients and regular readers of these newsletters will know that over the last four years Energy, Engagement and Trust has grown to be one of our main themes. So whether your organization is striving for "Extraordinary Best Companies" status or not, we thought that it would be worthwhile summarizing what we have on offer to help you get started and/or sustain good work already underway.

People exercise their "free will" to engage or not to engage!

So it's not about Performance Management, it is about the magic that occurs when someone is thinking and behaving as if it is their own business.

For most organizations this requires multi-level leadership of change, influenced by five of the eight "Extraordinary Best Companies" criteria:

Leadership
My Company
My Manager
My Team
Personal Growth

To get organizations started on these, we have designed three one-day workshops for Senior, Middle and First-line Managers. The title of these workshops is "creating and capitalizing on team energy and engagement" and the outcomes are:

Senior managers leave with new strategies and tactics for re-focusing and sustaining energy within their organization and/or business units.
Middle managers feeling "squeezed" from above and below, leave with new ideas and tools for communicating in all directions and capitalizing on everyone's potential in their departments.
First line management develop new approaches to re-engaging their teams through: commitment, energy, confidence and competence.

Working within their organizational context, each workshop focuses managers on techniques for turning negative energy into positive energy and "resigned" or "comfortable" teams into high-energy productive ones.

Also, picking up on the theme of "keeping it simple" we introduce an individual and group exercise, linked to four key Engagement areas, using pocket cards with ten "prompt" statements for each area:

Commitment Helping people to define their own goals and really believe that they can make a difference	Energy Being consciously clear about what we are looking for and spotting people doing things right
Confidence Giving people the personal strength to handle challenges head-on and make decisions	Competence Spending time developing people and continuously exploring ways for them to use their full potential

Sustaining Team Energy & Engagement - "Back From The Future"

For organizations wishing to follow up on the first workshop, we have developed a further day that uses "Back From The Future" storytelling to focus on five team engagement dimensions:

Tailored to your needs

Each of these highly interactive days, combine all the elements of our experience of Change and Engagement, to provide managers who are at the forefront of leading change, with straightforward tools that can be applied immediately and create a team where:
1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 6!!

Workshops are designed for a maximum of 12 managers. However the Wadenhoe Engagement Team of 13 facilitators can all deliver to the same, consistently high standard, with flexibility in one day. So where required we have the capability of handling large groups over short timeframes.

New for 2012: We know from conversations with clients that in some instances organizations only need workshops for a few managers, so we have now introduced a series of "open" workshops.

Other Associated Activities:

Engagement at a Distance - an invaluable route map for "virtual" leaders.
Measuring Engagement - the customer experience.
Enabling Engagement - departmental, inter-departmental and organizational enablers.
The Mood Meter™ - our own online Engagement Survey tool.

Getting Started

So at Wadenhoe, we understand engagement and we have all the resources you need to understand what it is, get started and keep it simple.

To arrange a conversation about our research and workshop activities, that can be delivered at any location, or at Wadenhoe House, our own residential management centre in Northamptonshire, please contact: ray@wadenhoeconsultancy.com.