Coventry City Council’s Employee Engagement Plan provides a mechanism for a strong employee voice, dialogue from the bottom to the top of the organisation and celebrating success and achievement. The plan encompasses the following six key areas to enhance and improve employee engagement across the Council:
- Purpose mission and values – Ensure the Council’s vision of ‘One Coventry’ is achieved through the actions and behaviours of our workforce to align with our ‘One Coventry’ values.
- Diversity and inclusion – Create a culture that allows our employees to bring their whole selves to work, feeling respected and valued for who they are, which will lead to increased levels of satisfaction, engagement and productivity or performance.
- Open and honest communication – Create a culture of open and honest communication where information is shared in a meaningful and effective way, and where we provide mechanisms to enable a strong employee voice to encourage and drive two-way communication.
- Leadership and management development – Strengthen the Leadership and Management across the Council to enable managers to confidently lead and engage with their teams.
- Learning and development – Provide continuous development of learning that addresses both professional/personal needs and legislative requirements that helps both the employee and the organisation to grow.
- Reward and recognition – Provide a reward and recognition offering that attracts, values, motivates and retains talent and supports and drives our organisational values and objectives.
The Four Enablers: Strategic Narrative
We have been on a journey – a journey to understand the needs of our employees, to create our ‘One Coventry Values’, and to meet our objectives of driving performance and employee engagement to deliver on our key business strategies.
Our ‘One Coventry Values’ have been co-created with the support and input of all employees across the Council, so they are reflective of how we want to be represented both as colleagues and to the wider community. We want to ensure there is clarity of purpose through the Council’s vision of our One Coventry Values and Behaviours; putting diversity and inclusion at the heart of everything we do. Moving forward the values will become an integral part of our: Reward Strategy, Appraisals, Recruitment, Attraction and Onboarding, Recognition and Development and Employee Engagement.
The response to creating our One Coventry Values and our recent Health and Wellbeing Survey have shown just how valuable engagement is and we will continue to build on this momentum as we recognise that there is still more work to be done.
The Four Enablers: Engaging Managers
To ensure our managers are recruiting the right candidates aligned to the One Coventry Values, we have ensured that recruiting managers have received the appropriate training to equip them with the skills required to adopt an inclusive approach to recruitment and diversify our workforce so that it is representative of our communities.
Our managers have also received access to several leadership and management development training programmes ranging from new managers to senior management to Strengthen the Leadership and Management across the Council to enable managers to confidently lead and engage with their teams.
Finally, managers have also received access to a recently launched coaching platform to encourage managers to focus on their self-development as well as also developing the coaching ability of managers and employees across the organisation.
The Four Enablers: Employee Voice
The Council has carried out several initiatives to engage with and ensure our employees have a voice such as:
- Organisational talks held by the CEO, whereby all employees are invited to attend, updates are provided, and employees have the opportunity to give feedback and ask questions.
- Regular health and wellbeing surveys to ensure employees have the opportunity to state how they are feeling, feedback on what’s going well and improvements.
- The Council have a range of employee networks which are representative of our diverse workforce who act as ambassadors for our employees and provide an employee voice.
- The Council also actively encourage focus groups, to seek employee feedback on new initiatives such as the development of the One Coventry Values, a new recognition programme.
The Four Enablers: Organisational Integrity
Ensuring there is clarity of purpose of the Council’s vision of One Coventry Values and behaviours.
Specific actions completed to date include:
- Developing a new ‘One Coventry Values’ brand, promoting to employees via the intranet, Council sites, the Staff App, new employee lanyards and other corporate templates.
- Integrating the values within the Council’s onboarding process including job adverts, job descriptions and an external Values webpage.
- Embedding the values within the appraisal process.
- Providing training to employees on the linkage between our behaviours and values.
Submitted by:
Louise Sobierski, Organisational Culture & Employee Engagement Manager, Coventry City Council
