43 | Employee engagement - Success is about the people, stupid!

You will not get employee engagement in an organization where there is no trust.

And only those who've really experienced the fantastic benefits of this— there's a sparkle in the eyes, there's humor, there's energy, things are happening. You know, when you've been a part of that, or even creating that, then you get hooked.

Welcome to the Inspiring Change Podcast, where we talk to leaders about all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Hi there and welcome to this episode of the Inspiring Change podcast. Those of you that listen or have listened to previous episodes of this podcast will know that employee engagement is something that we talk about pretty often. It's an area that's close to my heart and something that in Inspiring Change we help our clients with a lot. How do we get more from our people? How do we create a better working environment? It's interesting, employee engagement's only been around for about, as a concept, for about 25 years. It was talked about in management theory during the '90s, and in the mid-'90s, William Kahn was one of the first people to actually talk about it a little more and start to put some shape around what employee engagement might actually look like. We then got into the '90s, the 2000s, and then became a little more management practice than management theory. It was in 2009, and I was actually introduced to this piece of work back in probably about 2012, um, back in 2009, that, uh, David McLeod and Nita Clark produced a report called Engaging for Success. I'm going to let them talk a little bit more about that in a second. And for me, it was a seminal paper because quite often I think the whole area of employee engagement is still quite misunderstood. I think you say to a lot of people, employee engagement, I think there's definitely a cynicism there, and perhaps something that we'll get into in a second, that it's not about just a survey. Many people will say, well, I've done my engagement, and they schedule it for 10 to 12 on a Tuesday morning. It's not a one-off. Not a once-and-done. For me, employee engagement is very much about how we do the things we do rather than perhaps specifically what we do. So I'm delighted to be joined today by David and Nita, who I hope over the course of the next 35 minutes or so could perhaps put to bed some of those misunderstandings and, and maybe give us a bit of an insight into their work back in 2009, perhaps how that's applied today, and where maybe that's going forward. So David, Nita, good afternoon.

Hello.

What I might do is, first of all, I might let each of you kick off just by giving listeners a bit of background on yourselves, on your backgrounds, and what it is you do today. And you know what, we'll be chivalrous and we'll let ladies go first. So, Nita, why don't you kick us off?

Well, hi. Well, firstly, thank you very much for asking me to contribute to this podcast. David and I have been working together now since 2008, and It's an enduring partnership that I think I can genuinely say we've never actually had a cross word, which is quite extraordinary when you think about some of the work that we've done. So my background is this: I was a senior trade union official with Unison, the public sector union in the UK, and then in 2001 I went to Number 10 to work for Tony Blair as his advisor on trade unions employment issues, and I was there until Tony left in 2008. And then in 2007, rather, Tony left in 2007, the end of 2007, I got a job as Director of the Involvement and Participation Association, which is a not-for-profit charity which helps companies and organisations with engagement, but particularly listening to employee voice. And relations with trade unions, and then I was asked to, by Peter Mandelson, the then Secretary of State, to work with David on employee engagement, and we spent a year and then we produced the report in 2009, and we've been working together around Engaged for Success ever since.

Brilliant, thank you, that's some CV, David, you know, try and top that.

I would never try and top them. Well, look, very briefly, I've never worked in HR. My background is marketing. I run the Dulux brand across Europe. So thank you very much indeed, those who used it, and sorry about the wasted weekends. And then went on and managed businesses in Europe, and finally a global business that was a merger of an ISTI and a Unilever business.. And through all that, I just discovered that while all the issues of analysis and quantification of course are very important, this other thing called people seemed to me to be just as important. And I was lucky enough to be asked by the government to work with Nita. And we— well, frankly, it's one of the hardest years' work I've ever done. We went around the country together. It was a load of fun as well. I think we actually told We were laughing too much at one point when we were writing it, Nita, do you remember?

Yes, the civil servants were very anxious.

Anyway, so we had this— because the great thing is if you're writing a report to government, all doors open, and that was really incredibly helpful. We got anywhere we wanted to go. Since then, we've both been pushing this along. It's a movement. We decided we wouldn't try and raise lots of money and spend it. Rather, if there was real energy, wouldn't it be better to join up that energy by creating some forums, some fora that people could offer their thoughts, their challenges, their questions, and have a sort of mutual sense of tackling this issue, really with just two objectives, very simple. One, raise the profile of this topic, and secondly, shine a light on good practice, because that's good for organisations, good for individuals, and it's good for our country. I think it's fair to say, isn't it, Nita, we're cheerleaders rather than kind of managers of this.

Yes.

And we think it's probably ever more— it's ever more critical, and particularly at the moment.

Brilliant, brilliant. And I think, you know, having seen your work and applied your work, it's as applicable outside of the UK, I think, in any country as it is in the UK. Let's go back to what was the very kind of I suppose, kernel or seed of the idea, and that of course was back in 2009 when you were asked to produce this report, which took you a year. What was it, and why did somebody in government think that this was such a required piece of work?

I mean, shall I start on that? Because what happened was, I, you know, I'd started reading this stuff when I left Number 10 I was trying to keep up to date with what was going on in the world, and I started reading this stuff around employee engagement which was just coming out then. There were various kind of green shoots of it, and I went to Peter actually in Adelson and I said, look, I think the government needs to be interested in this for two reasons. One, because the government's a huge employer directly or indirectly, and if there are some insights about how to treat people at work to get the best out of them so that they feel fulfilled but for the organisation's benefit, then the government should really be interested as an employer. But secondly, the UK has traditionally had this huge productivity challenge, and it seemed to me when I was reading this stuff that one of the explanations for this— okay, there's issues around capital investment and training and so on— might be that actually people at work were just not engaged enough in what they were doing, either didn't care enough because the organisation didn't care for them, or in fact the organisation was placing obstacles in the way of them doing the job that they wanted. That actually if we could try and unlock some of this and see whether how people were being treated at work impacted on their productivity, then that might be one of the things that, you know, we could do some work on in the country as a whole and get organisations to understand that how they treated their people could be having a far greater impact than they believed. And that really, for me, was the door opening.

Okay.

I might add, Scott, that I'd written a book on the topic available at all good booksellers.

Yay! It's very early in this podcast for such a cheap self-promotion there, David.

Got me interested. But mine comes from a very complementary but different space. I mean, there's only 4 ways to improve business, it seems to me. And all of them have people who care, people who are committed, people who own issues in front of them at its heart. The only way you're going to create successful businesses really is to innovate. Small-scale innovation, big-scale innovation, and who innovates? It's not done in the boardroom, it's done by those at the front line who care, who try, who find ways around the roadblocks and inevitable difficulties. Innovation or customer service, those who care. We all know whether someone's engaged or not when we're in a call center, Thirdly, opening up new markets. It's very difficult to open up new markets, and only those who really research it, really, really cull best practice, really address the obstacles do it. And finally, we all have to do things more efficiently, and normally it's a thousand things more efficiently rather than one thing, and therefore engaged people find ways of doing that. And so running successful organizations, be it public sector— I've been involved in lots of public sector organizations for different reasons— public sector or private sector, it's loads of individuals in organizations caring and building on each of those issues to create sustainability, and heavens, isn't that important at the moment?

And I guess that whole idea that, you know, if people are looking for, you know, a 10% uplift in productivity, then actually if you go back to your example there of it not being one thing, it being a thousand things, you know, it's easier to get a thousand people to do a very tiny little change and then when all those are rolled together and rolled up, then actually you end up getting to that 10% rather than looking for the 10% change. Nita?

I guess the issue here though is that what David and I found was that most organizations still ran in a very bureaucratic, hierarchical, command-and-control way, and they weren't actually designed to release the potential of the people who worked there. I mean, of course, some pigs had more or less lipstick on, but broadly speaking, the default setting in most organizations was that people were the problem that had to be managed rather than the solution to the challenges in the organisation. We came up with this— I mean, it's not original— but we came up with this view: look, at the end of the day, you know, it's the people, stupid. You know, the truth of the matter is, however good your capital equipment or your IT system might be, if the people working in the organisation, you know, aren't motivated to use all of that stuff, to best effect, then basically you're standing on the top of your building chucking money away. Because if we, David and I, said to a chief finance officer, "Oh, it's okay if your computers only work a third of the time," they'd think we were stark staring mad. Well, how come across the— certainly the UK as a whole— only about a third of the workforce is actively engaged? And the problem with that is it's not just a waste for the organisation, but it's catastrophic for the people concerned. Because the impact on people's mental health of being frustrated, stymied, or underused at work is absolutely huge. And, you know, work is such an important part of who we are as people. When that goes wrong, or when we don't feel fulfilled, it has a massive impact on how we feel about ourselves as individuals.

Yeah, and I think for me, you know, and you were doing this work back in the late '90s, in 2009, and for me since, there have been so many organizations— global, national organizations— who've decided to go with this marketing line of, "We put customers first, we put the customer at the heart of everything we do." Well, that's fine, but actually, what about putting people first? What about putting your staff first? "Oh, well, our customers wouldn't like that," which to me just seems backward.

In fact, need to remember, we came across an organization doing a lot of work with schools, and their mantra, which I don't suppose go down very well with the politicians, but was, "Teachers first and people second." and they meant that on the basis that if the teachers are really engaged, energetic, inspiring, involved, and caring, then students, school people, pick that up and the school starts to work. It's not about they're more important than the pupils, it's just got to get that right. The vehicle that we use to get to customers and to get to those competitive advantage products and so on is through people. The thing I'd add to Anita's point, I think, as well, is that it's a bit like someone said to us, you remember, it's a bit like driving. We all think we're above-average drivers, and most people think they're good at employee engagement. I've never forgotten, we spoke to somebody who got the highest honors that the land knows how to bestow, and he said to us, 'I don't know why you're writing this report, it's completely obvious, this.' So I think we thought, well, that's nice, somebody's with us. And then I met somebody who worked for him about 3 weeks later, and I said, must be tremendous working for Lord So-and-so. And this chap fell about laughing and said, he's the worst person I've ever worked for. My name is with all the senior headhunters, and I can't wait to leave. That was a rather extreme example, but actually, work is tiring. Whatever we're doing, however successful you are. But to put another way of Nita's point, you go home— do you go home tired but basically with a sense of well-being to do the next thing, play with the kids, watch the telly, indulge in your hobby? Or do you go all stressed up, you know, and all uptight and take it out on your partner and inevitably reduce well-being? So definitely it spills over in a very easy to follow way.

I mean, it was interesting, David, wasn't it, when Dame Carol Black said to us— look, she is the expert on workplace health and wellbeing. I mean, she's right at the heart of government, both of all political persuasions. And when we were doing this report, and subsequently she's been extremely supportive of us, and she came to us and she said, look, if I could wave a magic wand to improve the health of the nation at work, it wouldn't be around musculoskeletal or, you know, chairs with backs on them. She said the one thing, if I could wave a magic wand, would be to improve the relationship between individuals and their line managers, because that is the single biggest cause of workplace ill health, you know, and she's right. And so obviously we were coming at it from a kind of what does good, broadly speaking, management look like, and she was coming at it from a health point of view, but you know, they're right at the heart of this topic, was the importance of it for the nation's health.

And that's something, that whole idea of people, leaders, line managers, supervisors, call them what you will, for me, them being at the heart of work because they are the people that we work for, we trust, we hear the most from, who set our objectives, who motivate us, they are the most important people in organisations for me, absolutely the most important people, and I know that they are one that having really engaging managers is one of your 4 enablers that you identified through writing this report. The first one, I believe, was narrative and having a really strong corporate story that people can get behind, perhaps maybe more emotionally rather than just rationally. David, you want to tell us a little bit more about that?

Yes. Organizations that, as you say, organizations that engage people We found time and time again as we did this report, we've definitely built on it over subsequent years, confirmed it and fleshed it out, these 4 things are present. And this one that you've just mentioned, Scott, is there's a story that most people in the organisation can hold in their heads, not lost in a 64-page document with lots and lots of figures, but a story about where the organisation has come from, where it is today, and critically, of course, where it aspires to go in the future, and that people have a hand in shaping certainly the implementation of that and preferably shaping the vision that they're going for. They're involved in it. You talked about an emotional commitment. Lots of really great organisations now harnessing things like little phone-led video clips where people explain and share their enthusiasm for what they're trying to do. That there's a sense of this common endeavour, that we're all committed to something bigger and more important than any individual role, and something that provides energy and a glue, if you like, that holds the organisation together and also allows delegation much more easily, because if you all know where you're going, then when you take those thousands of decisions every day, they're taken in pursuit of something that people understand. And the really great organizations put enormous effort into ensuring that people really have a hand in, own, really understand these things. And we could go through all sorts of examples of organizations where we've been hugely impressed with how we've done it—public, private, and not-for-profit.

And it's this whole idea, I guess, of, you know, we hear you know, terms like, you know, getting everybody rowing in the same direction, helping people to pursue the same North Star. You know, for me, that, that corporate narrative, that corporate story has to embody things like the purpose of the organization, has to embody things like the values of the organization and the behaviors we expect of people, and also the role that those people play in the organization in terms of driving the business forward in pursuit of that story.

I mean, I think this alignment point is absolutely critical because it's really clear that people want meaning and purpose at work. Now, not all the time, not every day, but basically you want to feel part of something that is bigger than yourself, right? And something, an organization, as you say, that you can trust. And the point about having a story that you can hold in your head is that you could describe the organization you work for down the pub, you know, and it gives you this alignment. You know the story about Kennedy going around Cape Canaveral and seeing all the men in white coats, and then on the way out, man leaning on the broom, and he shakes his hand and says, tell me about yourself, sir. And the man says, uh, Mr. President, I'm a janitor and I'm here to help put a man on the moon. And you know that if you can get that sense of clarity and alignment— now we can't all be NASA, but broadly speaking, that purpose, if you can get that sense of it, it's incredibly empowering because I know then where I fit in. And I think actually in recent months, if you look at what's happened in individual hospitals and health centres, certainly within the UK, that sense of alignment to the purpose of fighting COVID has led to some extraordinarily powerful changes within organisations. Things that might have taken 6 years took 6 days, you know, because that powerful North Star that people were aligned to with that common sense of purpose, I mean, you can move mountains with that.

And of course, having the purpose, having the corporate narrative is one thing, but for me, certainly, it's how it's contextualized and how it is translated for and with staff that makes a huge difference. And of course, that's the job of leaders, which I know is the second of your four enablers, Nita.

Well, what we found is that in any organization— we touched on this before— the leaders and the managers are absolutely critical. And in particular, we did a lot of focus on the role of leaders in telling the stories of the organization, but in particular the sense of what my manager— the relationship I have on an immediate basis with my immediate manager. And the kind of critical thing here was 'Did that manager firstly enable me— well, firstly tell me with clarity what my job is? What is it that I'm expected to do? What are the criteria for success? Who am I expected to do the role with?' So it's clarity about the role is incredible, because we found, didn't we David, lots of people saying, 'Well, you know, I really like— I still like it here, but I'm still not quite sure really what my job is, or who, you know, who I'm reporting to, or who I'm working with.' And that was kind of intensely frustrating. So there's this sense of focusing people, giving them scope to do the job that you want them to do, not micromanaging them. I don't know, Dave and I have this conversation a lot, both our experience of being micromanaged is the most debilitating thing. You have no freedom of maneuver and you feel like you're just a sort of widget being moved around. It's awful. So that sense of focus and scope, but critically treating people as individuals. I go back to my point of organizational culture. If you treat me like human resource number 54327, then I'm gonna be— I'm not a human resource, I'm a human being. And again, if you want to get the best out of me, you have to understand a bit about me. And boy, hasn't that been true in the past few weeks, because organizations have suddenly found their workforce scattered to the winds at home, working from home, and with all sorts of individual difficulties and requirements, some people shielding, some people looking after kids at home. The managers managing those teams have had to understand what the individual pressures are on each member of the team. Now we shouldn't just do that at a time of crisis, that should be kind of, you know, part of the game under normal circumstances. If you understand me as an individual, you know, then I am much more likely to respond Managers also need to make people feel part of the team, but it's also about giving constructive feedback. And some people sort of wince slightly when I say this, but in my view, managers should not walk past bad behavior, because the minute you do that, you're sending a signal that that behavior is okay. And, you know, so if everybody comes in 5 minutes late to my meeting and I don't do anything about that, you know, then what's the message I'm sending? It's okay to turn up in my meeting 5 minutes late. So this is not about, you know, all kind of sitting down, holding hands, wearing sandals and singing Kumbaya. This is about really understanding, you know, how each individual can contribute to the purpose of the organisation, but do it in a proper way. And I think that that is it. So as well as not treating people as part of the herd and treating them as individuals, you also have to treat them as members of the team, because actually what makes people so cross working in a team is when one or two people are swinging the lead and nothing happens, because who's taking up the slack?

I am. Yeah, for sure. One additional point— completely agree as ever with everything Nita said, which is not walking past dysfunctional behavior— but also we have a bit of a problem as Brits. We've mostly had the gene removed called the ability to give spontaneous, enthusiastic, in-the-moment feedback. Yeah, when something goes well and we're in the room and really got to make comment on it, goes something like 'Well, that didn't go quite as badly as I was expecting.' Now, we really— I mean, you know, the Americans do this much better than we do. They have other problems, but they do this much better than we do. They find a moment, and you don't need to make a palaver about it. You just need people— we're human beings, you know, we need a sense of humanity, we need to know that someone's noticed, we need a sense of affirmation, And feedback, as long as it's authentic— it's got to be authentic, it must not be formulaic— but if people really feel someone's noticed, that's incredibly important. And the stories at the moment of people working at home, building on Nita's point, scattered to the four winds, and no one ringing up and saying, "How are you? Love the work you did last week from home, this is tremendous," working away, not getting any feedback, they start to diminish as people because no one's really very interested in them. So we've got to put extra effort into this at the moment.

I was chatting to a client yesterday and I said to him that I'd been chatting to another company that I was doing some work with and what they had done, they only had 150 employees, but they had taken the 150 employees, they divided them into chunks of 30, a chunk for each of their senior leadership team, and those senior leadership team members, their only job was to ring those 30 people over the course of a week and say, how are you? Not to check up, not to find out what work was being done, not to find out when the project was going to be finished, to find out how they were as people. And what I found And that I found that very heartening as an example. What I found very sad when I said that to my client yesterday was he said, my God, if I asked our senior leadership team to do that, they would run a mile. Which is, which is awful, absolutely awful that people should be that inwardly facing, I guess. Your feedback is important to us, and I'd really appreciate it if you could please take a couple of minutes to rate this episode of the Inspiring Change podcast and perhaps leave a few words of feedback. Thanks so much. David, I touched earlier on the employee survey and people thinking that the employee survey is the be-all and end-all of employee engagement or that they are, in a sense, one and the same thing. I know they're not, you two know they're not, but they're certainly one of the 4 enablers that you identified in your work. Tell me a little bit more about employee voice.

Well, briefly, Anita and I are in favour of surveys, but that, as you say, is not what employee engagement is. Often the most interesting thing is how it's moved over time and so on. So perfectly in favour, typically now more frequent issue-focused research rather than the great big annual round, when actually we know organisations don't really need to, where morale goes down when they do it, because they spend an hour filling this form out, they know nothing's going to happen because nothing's ever happened in the past, so they're just frankly hacked off with having to do it again. But employee voice at its best is absolutely, absolutely critical. As Richard Baker, a very impressive business leader, said, you know, the job of CEO is to give the organisation a damn good listening to. People need to be heard. They don't need to always win the day with their arguments, of course not,. But if they put forward something and it's not followed, then there needs to be an explanation about why not. So voice is how you respect people, and it's a jolly sight better if it's an informed voice. One of the reasons that what's left of manufacturing industry is still there is because of the lean process. The lean process at its heart is saying to somebody who does something today, 'Put on the left-hand wall, write up how you do it today, and put on the right-hand wall how you could do it better.' And then they built brown belts, black belts, problem solving, but it's all about giving people a voice at how things can be improved at the front line. And by the way, as Nita always says, it can be the cheapest smoke alarm you'll ever have, because things go wrong in organizations all the time. The question is, do you catch them when they're a little bit wrong, or do you wait till you've gained the emissions tests in America, or do you wait till the oil's gushing out the Gulf? So if voice is available, if junior people have a voice to senior, and those that frontline have a voice to those in the back office, then issues travel and issues are caught earlier on. And with social media so available to us all, there's really very little excuse to not know how people feel, and for people to have mechanisms to explain that, both formal, informal, ongoing, periodic, so that by the end of it you should know how people feel. It's amazing how many organisations simply do not understand.

I think, just, can I just add one thing here, and that is that it is also particularly important that the voices are diverse. Because one of the key issues that we are all facing at the moment is that segments of the population, you know, still feel that they are not getting a sufficient voice, particularly in lots of organisations. So having things like BAME networks or women employee networks can be very, very helpful in making sure that it's not just one sort of voice that's being held, but that the diverse voices are being heard in the organization, because if you don't hear those voices, then it's quite difficult to include.

I think definitely, um, from a diversity perspective, for me, diverse thinking is, is one of the biggest things that the D&I movement can bring to workplaces. That diversity of thinking, not just in gender or in disability or ability, um, not just in, in sexual persuasion whatever it might be. I think that diversity of thinking is what really, really matters. And to pick up on a couple of the words that you used there, David, it is informal, it is through the year. Don't just tell me once a year. I remember somebody saying to me once, it's a bit like if when you're in a restaurant, and again, as a Brit myself, although I lived here for 20 years, I still find it very hard when somebody brings a steak to my table and it's overcooked. I ask for medium rare and it's medium or well. And You saw your way through it, and then at the end of the meal, you hand it back and you go, "That's very nice, yes, very nice." Or you say, "Oh yeah, it was a bit overdone." Now, there was absolutely nothing the maître d' or the waiter can do about that meal at that point in time. They could have fixed it 20 minutes ago when you said, "This is a little overdone. Would you mind doing another one?" Which of course they would. The same with this whole area. There's no point in waiting to tell me 'You know, don't wait to tell me until the Exxon Valdez is pouring a billion gallons of oil into the Gulf. Tell me about the stopper valve, you know, 3 years ago.' But making those channels available is so, so important. Integrity is the last, David, of the 4. Tell me a little bit about that.

So I think that what we're thinking— the basis here is this: Are the values on the wall reflected in day-to-day behaviours? Everybody's got values on the wall. I mean, some of the best ones we ever, you know, we ever read are what companies behave egregiously. The issue is not what, you know, okay, the values matter, but the issue is not having values on the wall. The issue is having a clearly defined set of day-to-day behaviours which makes those values live, and what happens in the organisation when somebody doesn't live up to them? If it's a senior person, does everybody sort of shuffle and look embarrassed and nothing happens? Or actually, you know, does the organisation take steps to make sure that no matter how high or how senior you are, you abide by the behavioural rules? And if there's a gap between the two, of course, what's happening is you're creating mistrust in the organisation, and that is the most corrosive— a mistrustful environment is the most corrosive thing to live in, and it is absolutely antithetical to engagement. You will not get employee engagement in an organisation where there is no trust, and so keeping your promises to the organisation, or if you can't keep the promises, explaining why, you know, again, sort of treating people with respect and treating people as valued parts of the organisation. I mean, frankly, this sense of integrity and trust is absolutely critical. And when you get something wrong, hold your hand up and admit it. Alright, people aren't stupid. I think governments could listen to this sometimes. I mean, they see through the kind of spin and the obfuscation. If you get something wrong, 'Oh, the organisation's got something wrong.' Admit it, redeem it, and moved on. And this sense of trust really goes to the heart of what the culture in the organisation is. And, you know, it's getting this right, and it's really difficult because, as somebody said, you know, 'Trust enters on foot and leaves on horseback.' You know, so this is difficult stuff, this really is. But, you know, you don't get this right, ignore this, and the entire organisation is built on quicksand.

I remember, and I think integrity is core and key to any organisation. There was a story here in the media a couple of weeks back. One of our ministers in the government had been caught for drink driving 3 years ago, had had his licence taken off him, had done his time. I think actually he was on a learner permit, he wasn't actually on a full permit, but he'd been done for drink driving. And to me, the idea of— and he was then a TD, as we call them here, an MP in the UK— the fact that that he was even doing that, that he was even drink driving anyway, without regards to being caught or not, was shocking to me. The response of the government not to immediately, when that came out, to say, you're gone, you can't have— now it took 2 or 3 weeks for that to eventually happen, but we all knew the minute that came out it should have just been instantaneous. Well, I'm afraid that you can't work here anymore because that's something that we are completely against. And I think what shocked me probably the most out of that whole story was— it comes back to the point that you made about the mea culpa, about putting your hand up and saying, look, I screwed up and I'm sorry, I wasn't living the values that we expect as an organization or a country to hold each other to account for. His response was, when he got fired, his response was, I was surprised and disappointed by the decision, which just pours a big can for me of petrol onto an already fairly ferocious fire. So shocking, but I think that whole idea of integrity is so, so important. So given that we know all this, given that we know that having a really strong story is important, having engaging leaders is important, giving employees voice is important, and integrity is really key, given that we've known employee engagement is on the agenda and has been on the agenda for probably some 20 years now, in various guises. Why is it— and you alluded to this yourself earlier on, uh, Nita, I think, when you said that only a third of the UK workforce is actually engaged— if we look at the global workforce and a lot of the studies, people like Gallup will tell us that 80% of people globally are disengaged. If we know the right things to do, why is that still the case, and why has that number not moved over the past two decades?

I'll tell you, I'll tell you one little thought that we found quite interesting, didn't we? We did a bit of qualitative research amongst leading chief executives who were minded to be interested in the topic because they agreed to be interviewed, and about what the barriers were to engagement, and done with Ashridge. And it's very interesting, if you boiled it right down to the core thought, it was this: it's more emotionally demanding to lead engagingly than to lead through command and control. If you want me to lead— and you know, I can go to prison now if for a significant health and safety, you know, I get fired if I have 2 quarters in a row significantly below budget. I can, you know, the pressure on me intense. And you want me to do what? You want me to reveal myself? You want to write blogs about who I am? You want me to turn up to things to talk to people? Endless amount, you know. You can see how it happens. I don't have time to do those things because I'm kept busy with the other things. Unfortunately, if you don't attend to things we've been talking about throughout the podcast, then you're not going to have engaged employees and you're not going to— you're far less likely to win. So I think that there's a huge amount of inertia in those who've got to the top. They got to the top because they had— they've grown up in a different era. They had to make their name, they probably managed a big project and so on, and those who've got real experience of creating an environment in which others flourish is a skill that's not natural to everybody and it does need working out and it is very effortful and only those who've really experienced the fantastic benefits of this, that when you walk in the shoulders are back, there's a sparkle in the eyes, there's humour, There's energy, things are happening. You know, when you've been a part of that or even creating that, then you get hooked. When we were doing the research— I'll finish with this— a hell of a lot of people said, which is very clear but very unhelpful, you either get it or you don't. You either get this topic or you don't get this topic. And while that's clear, it's not great for writing a report.

That's absolutely right. The other thing that people said to us was, you know it when you see it. Which is also true. You know when you walk into an organisation within 10 seconds whether this is an organisation with the potential or the actual reality of engagement. Look, this stuff is hard. It is much easier to manage with command and control at one level, you know, because— but this stuff is hard because it involves understanding people, it's messy, it's all of those things and you know, you've also kind of got to be a bit convinced about, you know, that there's a return on investment of this, because, you know, you're asking me to do all these things differently, but at the end of the day, if I just stick to what I'm doing, well, we're doing okay, aren't we? However, I would say this, and I think there is a difference between when we started and now. This issue now is, it is at the boardroom much more. Now, I'm not saying that boardrooms know what to do with it, Okay, but it is now. I mean, there would be very precious few organizations that didn't have at least some conversation around what's happening with the workforce, and certainly in the UK, the Financial Reporting Council now requires organizations in the FTSE 250 to report at board level on what's happening with the workforce. There has to be a nominated director that talks about what's happening within the workforce, and certainly investment organizations, David, we found this, haven't we, are much more interested in looking at employee metrics. I don't just mean, you know, absenteeism or turnover. I mean employee metrics like workplace satisfaction and so on. So I think there's much more awareness. The problem is that it does require some real changes in leadership and management style, and it involves putting people at the heart of the organization. And, you know, it's difficult, isn't it? It's difficult to do, and you manage in the way that you kind of learn from your predecessors, and that's how the kind of that predominant paradigm kind of continues over generations. It's hard.

Just one tiny point of encouragement in a way, which is, as Nita says, it's now talked about. I think we had our biggest ever visitorship to our Engage for Success website, and Nita and I would not claim any credit for this at all, the team have put it together. It's the www.engagedforsuccess.org. Had over 30,000— 35,000 hits, was it, last month? The most ever, and about 65-70% from abroad. I mean, the topic is out there. We've got someone volunteering from us because they were asked to look at this for Ottawa, you know, province in Canada, and are now involved in volunteering. I mean, there is a sense, anecdotal and some practical, some research sense that the topic is gaining some ground. And when the Financial Times does a huge big spread on the need to reboot capitalism and to involve all stakeholders, especially and including employees, you know that things are beginning to turn. And when— was it the chief executive of JPMorgan in New York? You think of probably red in tooth and claw, the sort of heart of that kind of capitalism. Says, you know, this total focus on short-term shareholder value has run its course. We really are going to have to now serve wider society, obviously including environment and customers and state and employees and so on. There's a sort of, there's a sort of a mood change, but as Dieter says, it's incredibly hard and it's no short-term fixes. You've got to work at this every single day for a long period before people really believe and it starts to seep into the system. Agreed, agreed.

And actually, it was Pedro, Pedro Angulo that said in episode 42, you know, it takes 5, 6, 7 years to affect any kind of cultural change. And for me, employee engagement, treating people in the way that we've just been talking about over the past little while, that really is, is, is kind of all wrapped up in the culture of an organization. So it does take time, and you have to just keep at it, as hard as that is, to keep doing the same thing day in, day out. When I think back to your report, it was 11 years ago now, and I'm sure it probably doesn't feel like that. You know, what, what do you think if you look now at things like, you know, very recently we've had the Black Lives Matter movement, we've had a movement among people that, that's probably moved maybe beyond employee engagement, perhaps to employee empowerment, you know, that whole voice piece has really started to bubble up. You know, we've got the D&I agenda, we've got the mental health and mental well-being agendas all coming up now, we've got corona piled on top of all of that globally. I wonder, is there, is there one thing that now, if you were looking at your 4 enablers, is there anything else you would add to those 4, or is there any one of them that you think nowadays to help to, to help to, um, I guess address some of those themes that are coming up through, through people in work? Is there any that you would perhaps turn up the volume on.

I just offer this thought in a way. In this podcast, one thing we haven't answered yet, which I think binds these together and provides the umbrella in answer to the question, which is this: that we stopped counting at 64 definitions now running of employee engagement. What we really think it's about is there's a level of capability and potential in me, in you, in everyone. And if you put me in one situation, you get a small percent of what I'm capable of and I develop a bit. If you put me in a different, a better situation, you get all of my capability and I develop much, much more fully. Now that, that is an ongoing issue which, which like overrides, forms bridges between the various manifestations of effort. So So for a period there's employee experience comes, and that's a part of how you create the conditions that people want to offer more than capability potential, employee engagement if you like, or well-being has been, is and will continue to be central to the thinking, or working from home and coronavirus, but the central tenets that organizations have better sense of well-being for their organisation, for the people in the organisation, if we're developing and growing and contributing. That, if you like, is what we would like to feel— wouldn't we need a permanent issue that runs through this? And as other issues, uh, de la Jour, come and go a bit, they're all adding to the experience, they all represent something relevant to society at that point in time, or to the business challenges at that point in time, and we welcome them all. Sometimes we say, well, do we mind that employee experiences is now talked about? No, fantastic, because it's an aspect of what we're talking about, as is wellbeing, as is the customer experience. Anita, yeah?

Yeah, and it comes back to this thing, you know, it is the people, stupid. I mean, it is. And any organization that doesn't understand that, that basically treats people like a disposable asset like any other bit of investment, capital investment and so on, is in the long term doomed to failure in my view, particularly as the world changes because those organizations don't change. They stay as kind of monolithic and then they become dinosaurs. So this sense of why, of why putting— understanding that people are at the heart of the organization, the more we can get that message out the more we can get people thinking about, well, what would release the energy and creativity of the people in your organization? What could you be doing more? What outcomes could you be achieving if you really release the energy of your people? The more we can pose those questions, and governments can pose those questions, particularly as we're all going to find it very difficult to come out of the current crisis. It's going to be all hands to the pump. And therefore partly learning the lessons of coronavirus, which is that, you know, you enable people, you know, through understanding them, to do the job you want them to do under very difficult circumstances. I mean, I think that, you know, that kind of goes to the heart of it, and if we don't engage, then we are going to lose all that capacity and all that capability and all that commitment, and it will be very damaging for our country. Damaging for the organizations and the people, but damaging for our countries too.

Let's talk, very final question, very briefly about COVID And obviously we've been with, or it's been with us now for probably getting on for 5 months, I guess, that we've been locked down at home, that we've been on our own, that we've been flexi-working, that we've been worried about friends and family and loved ones. I wonder, have you any sense, perhaps anecdotally or through any research you've seen, that organisations that do have maybe more engaged workforces, have they fared better through this fairly turbulent time?

Well, I don't know, David, what you think, but I suspect in some cases it's more early to tell. But I can tell you this, that the degree of change and innovation, particularly in the public sector, you know, to deal with the day-to-day impacts— not just the public sector, actually, if you think about all those key workers the degree of innovation that they have shown in adapting. I was fortunate enough to— I was hospitalized with breathing difficulties very early on in the pandemic, and my local hospital had already reorganized to an incredible extent, a hospital I know extremely well. And, you know, they had really thought about how they were going to deal with patients coming in with COVID There was a kind of a practical reorganisation, but how they behave towards each other and to patients, it was just extraordinary. It was brilliant. And, you know, that change came in, as I said, I went into hospital at the end of March, so right at the very beginning of all this, and they'd already, you know, really thought about how to deal with the situation. And so in some cases, you know, I think it has been a spur, you know, to very positive changes happening in a matter of days or weeks that would have taken years before. For her. I think learning the lessons of that and how that happened and what people did and what worked, I mean, I think will be very, very important so that we don't go back simply to the previous state of play. And I'm very encouraged by the fact that a lot of companies and organizations are really looking again at how they organize work so that people can work much more flexibly and can work from home and so on. Force everybody to do it, but I think there's some real potential positives there. I don't know what you think, David?

I completely agree, and I'd add one point to something you said much earlier on, Nita, about engaging managers and treating people as human beings. One of the things that organisations I've noticed are struggling with slightly is the top team have a particular view on this. They're slightly the gung-ho end, or they're slightly at the anxious end, and in their teams there will be every view. There will be those who are desperately worried and those who feel this is all a bit overdone, and they've got to— the leader's got to find a way forward that respects all these very different emotionally held views on the virus, and those who impose their sense of what is right and wrong will struggle. So having organisations and managers in those organisations who of course have a sense of what the company broad policy is, but are allowed to flex that in relation to the human beings with all their various attitudes to work to, is terribly, terribly important in general and specifically on this topic.

Yes, I agree, David, and I think that, to be honest, that reinforces my thinking around the key role that managers have to play in driving engagement and creating great cultures in organizations. Look, really conscious of time, before we wrap up though, it might be useful, we've talked about Engage for Success, we've talked about the movement, but if listeners want to get involved, if they want to get more information, or indeed delve into the vast amount of content that you have on engagement, where do they go? What is it they need to do?

Well, thank you very much, Scott. Just picking up your previous remark, and people want to, people want to share and learn together, don't they? This is something that we're better off for, for sharing our frustrations and our best practice and so on. So there is a website, www.engagedforsuccess.org. It's been built up over many years. There's a huge amount of of papers and ways that people can get involved. It's all on the website. There's those people who get on it just to find out what the latest thinking is, to find out insights on particular topics you can investigate under topic themes, or they want to get involved in some way. They want to make a contribution because we're a movement We're just a group of people who want to push this topic forward, and so people who contribute by— contribute a question, contribute a thought paper, contribute by getting involved— there's over 100 people contributing in various ways, so it's a great way to feel a sense of camaraderie with others, to share, to learn, to offer, is a nice way of doing it.

Brilliant, thanks David, I think that's a great place to leave it. You know, I think If we go back to the very top of the podcast where I talked about employee engagement not being about a survey, about it not being a once-and-done thing, about it being something that has to continue on through the life of organizations, you know, I hope that the chat today with David and with Nita has helped to put some of those misconceptions to bed, has given you listeners a better understanding of employee engagement and the benefits it can bring. So for now, I'm going to say thank you to David and Nita, and we'll leave it there. Thanks so much.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

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