‘Organisational
culture isn’t part of the game, it IS the game’
Lou Gerstner, retiring Chairman of IBM, 2002
Programme
Background
There’s now clear evidence linking organisational culture, productivity and profit. A
study of 100 medium sized companies over a ten year period by Sheffield University and the London School of Economics
confirmed that engaging the work force through increased responsibility and providing
opportunities for personal development, have a much bigger impact on productivity and
profit than Quality Systems and Research and Development
Yet evidence from a survey of 1.7 million
employees by Gallup indicated that
more than 2/3rds of people were either not-engaged or actively disengaged. The cost in
absenteeism, staff turnover and lost productivity was enormous. Outmoded
command-and-control management plays a major part in employee disengagement. It stifles
initiative and encourages a focus on meeting internal needs rather than those of customers
and business partners.
In a world which increasingly demands 24 / 7
service, management can no longer rely on power and control but must delegate authority to
front-line staff in the interests of customer satisfaction. And staff need to accept
greater responsibility for their work, not only for day to day operational matters such as
productivity targets, quality and staffing schedules, but also for actively seeking
improvements. This is engagement in practice and requires a
reversal of the traditional manager-employee relationship. Rather than making demands of
staff, in the ‘engaged’ work place, the key role of management is to ensure that
staff have the resources and support that enables them to take full responsibility for
providing excellent customer service.
Programme Outcomes
This programme will:
§
highlight the building blocks of effective work
force engagement
§
provide diagnostic tools to enable you to
evaluate the level of engagement in your workplace
§
identify changes that will increase the
engagement of your people.
PROGRAMME SCHEDULE
This is a short development programme in three stages:
Stage
One
A half day workshop which will review
the research data on engaged versus disengaged staff including the costs and benefits,
procedures, policies and leadership style that encourages
engagement.
Stage
Two
Using a range of simple diagnostic
tools, delegates evaluate the level of engagement in their own workplace
Stage
Three
A further half day
workshop to review each delegate’s survey results and identify actions to improve the
level of engagement.
‘Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are
healthy responses to absurd work’
Frederick Herzberg |