employee engagement brief

www.teambusinessdevelopment.co.uk

Employee engagement programmes | Organisational stress audits HR leadership training | Personal stress management coaching

Employee engagement

The key to higher productivity & organisational success



Why is employee engagement important?

Engaged employees are committed and loyal to their organisation; they have a close affinity with it and an emotional connection to the people they work with. They believe in what the organisation is trying to achieve, have faith in their management and feel enabled to do the best job they can with the right tools to do it.

Employee engagement programmes can boost employee energy by well over 50% or more

The key to employee engagement - fulfilling emotional needsMaslow’s hierarchy of five emotional needs was great in the 1950s. But science has moved on since then.

We now work with a new model of eleven ‘emotional needs’ that pinpoint more accurately why people become disengaged. Essentially we now know that where work conflicts with or neglects one or more of our emotional needs we start to get stressed. And stress is the major contributor to employee disengagement and low productivity.

Reengaging employees is about getting them back into their natural brain state. We do this by finding which emotional needs are activating the stress response and then adjust the working environment to remove the stress, reengage the work force and transform productivity.

Companies with the most engaged employees show revenue growth two and a half times higher than rival firms who have the lowest

level of engagement Hay Group research

UK employees are ranked 18th out of

20 countries for low engagement

ORC International survey


Employee engagement programme - 7 step process

The auditor works with you to customize the employee engagement programme to suit the unique needs and character of the organisation. Typically the programme will follow a seven step pattern:

The first step in a successful employment engagement strategy is the organisational stress audit.

The costs of stress in terms of absenteeism, stress related sickness and compensation claims are generally recognised. Less well known is the everyday impact stress has on employee engagement, organisational performance and productivity. This is a serious problem, as currently, stress is intrinsic to the way we run organisations.

The stress audit (comprising steps 1 - 4) finds out why your people are disengaged and identifies the obstacles to higher productivity.

Working time lost due to sickness

absence is 8.1 days per employee in the public sector and 5.1 days in

the private sector(ExpertHR report 2014)

80% of UK companies face a lack of employee

engagement (Deloitte survey)


At Strategic level stress contributes to poor judgement, insatiable greed and power lust, destructive competitive rivalry and incompetent, reckless and unethical decision-making.

At Management level stress drives rushed and inadequate operational planning, corrosive ‘impression management’, defective analysis, flawed problem solving, faulty decision-making, unethical and controlling behaviour, weak relationship building and de-motivating leadership.

At Operational level stress provokes employee disengagement, inauthentic working relationships, personal conflicts, poor communication, compassion fatigue, insensitivity to customers’ and other colleagues’ needs, accidents, costly mistakes and rework, lethargy, low creativity, waste, resistance to change, high employee attrition and incoherent teamwork.

If your organisation experiences stress at all three levels, then it is at risk of seriously malfunctioning, as the interaction of stressed individuals between these three functional areas will always compound the problems.

Stress impacts every level & every function

The destructive power of stress in the organisation is why it is so important to remove or at least alleviate stress factors or ‘stressors’ in the work place. Stress is a toxic constraint on employee engagement and productivity

IF AN ORGANISATION EXPERIENCES STRESS AT ALL THREE LEVELS IT WILL SERIOUSLY MALFUNCTION


The audit searches for the 30 stressorsThe auditor works alongside you and your management team using powerful diagnostic tools to identify where any of the 30 common stressors may be impacting performance, motivation, and productivity. Importantly, the audit often locates the remedies needed to transform the situation and generate cost saving improvements to productivity and engagement.

Organisational stress audit

The organisational stress audit comprises a comprehensive review of the organisation to find ways to energise your workgroup, re-engage them and unleash their innate talents to the benefit of your organisational goals.

Organisational stress Model

Each year 9.9 million working days are lost due to stress(HSE Labour Force survey

2014/2015).


Employee engagement programme - Scope

The employee engagement programme addresses eight key questions:

Stress, anxiety and depression cost employers (inflation adjusted)

£1,355 per year in terms of absence, under-productivity and staff turnover

for every employee on the payroll. The researchers estimated that

management could save 30% of these costs through simple prevention and

early identification of problems(‘Mental Health at Work:

Developing the Business Case’, The Centre for Mental Health 2007)

Stress accounts for 35% of all work related

ill health cases, and 43% of all working days

lost due to ill health(HSE Labour Force survey

2014/2015).

1. Which of the 30 stressors are impacting your organisation?

Audits study seven categories of stressor. These include the management style, structure and function, strategic and operational issues, physical factors, psychological and relationship factors and external influences.

2. What are the root-causes of these stressors? The audit does not stop at superficialities, but drills down to the underlying problem.

3. What is the impact of the stressors on the organisation in terms of financial costs and probable financial costs in the future? Among other metrics, costs to the organisation can be measured in working hours lost, due to disagreements, slow working, accidents, illness, days off, mistakes, rework, employee churn etc.

4. How are these costs affecting your bottom line or budgetary control? Relating the cost of stress to the overall P & L helps develop a business case for employee wellbeing and engagement.

5. What remedies are available to rectify or alleviate the problems? The auditor works with your team using bottom-up feedback to come up with solutions.

6. How can these remedies be implemented? Part of the engagement programme involves action planning with your management team to develop a coherent and integrated engagement strategy.

7. How much are these remedies likely to cost? Will the savings justify the costs?

Create a business case for employee engagement.

8. How can your improvements be imbedded for the long-term?

This last question involves elements of training and or coaching for the management team in the understanding of employee engagement and its impact on the work environment.


The employee engagement strategyA successful employee engagement strategy motivates people to invest the discretionary effort required to help grow the business and boost productivity. The remedial strategy emerges from the audit and usually involves small incremental improvements and adjustments such as:

1. Process redesign and new work practices. Make it easier for people to do their work.

2. Appropriate technology solutions including automation of routine administration. Remove unnecessary administration that provides no added value from the customer’s point of view and gets in the way of purposeful work.

3. Participation by employees in work planning and design. Collaborative working meets a number of key emotional needs and is a powerful engager.

4. Career progression. Clarifying status and long-term involvement helps meet key emotional needs including security, a sense of belonging, challenge and achievement.

5. Incentives for hard work, innovation and loyalty. Clarify the connection between good work and rewards. Provide benefits and perks that meet employees’ actual emotional needs and you receive a high payback in engagement and productivity.

6. Recognition. A key emotional need in itself and essentially can be met cost free to the organisation.

7. Family friendly working ethos with flexibility as to where and when people work. Provide support and encouragement to hard-pressed family members provokes a high payback in loyalty and commitment.

8. Leadership style, function and structure. Adjustments to management attitudes can have an impact completely disproportionate to the cost of adopting new leadership practices.

The economic costs of work stress to society

have been estimated to lie between 0.5% and 1.2% of UK GDP, equivalent to between £10.3 billion and

£24.7 billion today(Stress at Work British Academy

Policy Centre 2010)

The average cost of ‘sick’ days has been estimated at £618 per day. As such, workplace stress costs

the UK economy a total of £6.12 billion per year(HSE Labour Force survey

2014/2015).


How the individual stress response wrecks mental and emotional functioning at work – a crucial first step in understanding why much current management thinking disengages employees

Exactly what triggers a stress response at work and how this impacts engagement and productivity

How to measure the organisational costs of disengagement and build a business case for employee wellbeing

How to get your team’s inherent survival instincts working for you rather than against you

The 10 emerging ideas from neuroscience which are changing the way we need to think about leadership and management

How to develop management thinking that works in line with human nature to convert stressed and disengaged employees into highly motivated, energised and enthusiastic performers

How stress distorts your business decision-making, particularly group decision-making

Why removing a long hours culture is a win-win for employee wellbeing and organisational performance

How to identify and remove the thirty common stressors at work that disengage employees and damage productivity

Why an atmosphere of trust underpins employee engagement, retention and performance

Embedding 50% higher engagementThirty years of progress in the field of neuroscience and psychology are changing the way we need to think about employee engagement.

The programme utilizes advances in science, to give you principles, concepts, tools and techniques that boost employee energy and engagement by over 50% or more and transform organisational destiny. Embedding engagement for the future involves training and coaching in core skills, so as to sustain improvements and motivate dramatically higher motivation, commitment and productivity on an on-going basis.

Embedding the results shows you:


Designing organisations for humans

TestimonialsThe training made me think about the concept of management and how it is misunderstood by most of its practitioners. Social services manager

I found the new understanding of the impact poor management and procedures can have on both morale and the effectiveness of the workforce particularly helpful. Staff counsellor, civil service.

The audit provided me with structured factual information that gives me a framework for implementing on-going change. Because the whole approach is experiential I am able to become self-sufficient in the techniques immediately. Stress counsellor

I learnt techniques that enable me to be more objective and to clarify the main stressors in my practice rather than tackling the problem as general stress. Learning to evaluate the hidden cost to the organisation of stressors and stressed behaviour is extremely useful. GP manager

The audit has clarified concerns I have had about my organisation and I can now see the stressors more objectively. Private sector rehabilitation manager

The audit provides highly practical strategies. In particular the feedback forms and the emotional needs assessment questionnaire are really useful. The practical methods create a structure for presenting evidence for changes needed to improve stress at work. Head teacher

The emotional needs questionnaires stood out as being particularly helpful. The training offered insight and tools to change and I gained a better understanding into the stressors of organisations. There were very concrete materials and tools to take away and adapt and use later on. HR manager

Contact us and ask how we can help you create a more effective and dynamic enterprise. Without obligation, we will discuss your requirements and the parameters of the situation. We can then prepare a pre-assessment and a bespoke proposal.

Jeremy Old is author of

‘Reinventing management thinking – Using science to liberate the human spirit’ This easy to read handbook explains the principles and research behind our employee engagement programmes. With the help of numerous diagrams and a rich supply of case examples the book explains why employees are getting so stressed these days, what happens when they do and how we can redesign our work culture to remove the stress and transform engagement.

Included in the text are highly practical working definitions of the stress response and the eleven psychological needs, as well as a detailed description of the ‘thirty stressors’ that hold back engagement and productivity.

Now available from Amazon: http://amzn.to/1PDwdtA

I found the structured approach to collaborative decision-making and the materials used in the stress audit particularly useful. This gave me information I can use immediately on an on-going basis. I know these new tools will be effective, helping me to identify stressors more easily and even more importantly identify the solutions.

Social Services team leader

Contact details: Jeremy Old MBA BSc HGDip

Call: 0845 0945 819 jeremy@teambusinessdevelopment.co.ukwww.teambusinessdevelopment.co.uk


The first ninety minutes of any consultation is totally free of

charge.

employee engagement brief

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