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We recently held a dinner for CEO’s to discuss employee engagement. We invited CEOs from the top FTSE 100 and 250 and over 30 people attended – CEO’s whom we had not before, but who all clearly shared an interest in discussing and sharing insights around effective employee engagement. What many see as the Holy Grail of human resource management.

David MacLeod, who wrote the Government report on ‘Engaging for success: enhancing performance through employee engagement’, started off by stating that engagement, going to the heart of the workplace relationship between employee and employer, can be a key to unlocking productivity and to transforming the working lives of many people for whom Monday morning is an especially low point of the week. Employee engagement enables an adult, two-way relationship between leaders and managers, and employees, where challenges can be met, and goals achieved, whether it be improved patient care, higher quality production, or more satisfied customers.

Employee engagement strategies enable people to be the best they can at work, recognising that this can only happen if they feel respected, involved, heard, well led and valued by those they work for and with. As a representative of the home insulation company KHI put it: “employee engagement is when the business values the employee and the employee values the business”.

Characteristics of engaging organizations he suggests include

• Leadership that ensures a strong, transparent and explicit organisational culture that gives employees a line of sight between their job and the vision and aims of the organisation.
• Engaging managers who offer clarity, appreciation of employees’ effort and contribution, who treat their people as individuals and who ensure that work is organised efficiently and effectively so that employees feel they are valued, and equipped and supported to do their job.
• Employees feeling they are able to voice their ideas and be listened to, both about how they do their job and in decision-making in their own department, with joint sharing of problems and challenges and a commitment to arrive at joint solutions.
• A belief among employees that the organisation lives its values, and that espoused behavioural norms are adhered to, resulting in trust and a sense of integrity.

John Smythe focused more on how you enable this to happen – by stimulating a culture of distributed leadership that liberates people to accelerate day-to-day performance and drive big-ticket change. His top ten recommendations include

• Make all leaders, managers and supervisors chief engagement officer
• Engage people in big ticket change
• Agree the givens and introduce processes that turn the hierarchy upside down in well governed way
• Align communication with the engagement agenda
• Help everyone se the value of their role
• Don’t necessarily believe that survey

Do all this and Monday mornings may become the highlight of the week.