Welcome to the Engage For Success website! If you are an employee, or self-employed and working as part of a team, or just interested in employee engagement, and you want to find out more about employee engagement, how to make work better in your organisation, how to meet like-minded people, you’ve come to right place.
What we do
We want everyone working in the UK to want, and be able, to give their best each day, so that each day is a great day at work, and that workplaces in the UK are thriving, growing and developing through the commitment, energy, and creativity of the people that work in them. For us, employee engagement is a better way to work that benefits individual employees, teams, and whole organisations. Go to ‘Who are we?’ to find out more about our vision, aims, values and activity, and who’s in our movement.
What’s your workplace like?
We’ve visited some great workplaces, where everyone really enjoys working there, people are clearly involved in a common goal, everyone feels part of the team and treats each other with respect, everyone feels involved in how the work and the organisation is developing. You can read about some of these places in Engaging for Success. We found these places were usually characterised by four features, which we call our four enablers of employee engagement:
- Strong Strategic Narrative: a pithy and succinct story that every person in the organisation can tell, explaining the purpose of the organisation and how they fit in.
- employee voice, where leaders listen to employee concerns, invite ideas, and involve employees in decisions that affect the organisation and their work
- engaging managers, who make everyone feel part of the team, set clear goals, give regular feedback on performance, celebrate achievement, offer learning and development, and say ‘thank you’
- organisational integrity where leaders keep the promises they make or explain why they can’t.
But what if your workplace is like this?
Some of us work in places where change just happens, and no one ever explains why. In fact, no one even says that change is about to happen. You just go into work one day and your work has been reorganised. You haven’t been consulted, no one asks what you think, or whether you have a better idea, which seems strange as you are the one who knows the job inside out.
Some of us work in places where we wonder what our manager does all day, where we receive little or no feedback on how we are doing, where we learned the job from the last person that did it, and when we achieve something we know is a great success, no one says ‘thank you’, let alone celebrates it in front of the team or give us a reward.
Some of us work in places where we are always being promised things, but they never happen – a review of how shifts are organised, or pay!, a new fridge in the kitchen, better IT – and no one says why!
Some of us don’t want to go into work tomorrow, because we know we’ll be bullied again. It is unfair but no one is doing anything about it. We’re feeling stressed, and it is making us ill.
So how can you start to make a difference?
Here are some key questions to work through
- What do I want to change?
- How much do I want change?
- How much time and effort am I prepared to devote to change?
- How much do I believe I can bring about change?
- Who can I involve?
- Who can help?
- Who do I need to involve?
- What can we do 1st?
And what can Engage for Success do to help you?
Some challenging questions depending on the size of your organisation. So how can EFS help?
- Find out more about employee engagement and the four enablers of engagement. There is lots of other material in get thinking that you might find useful, but these are a good starting point.
- Get connected with other like-minded people through our social media.
- Join your local Thought and Action Group and meet other people keen to change their workplaces for the better.
- Join an Engagement Explosion Action Learning Set and learn from others through questioning and listening how you can meet the challenges ahead.
- Browse through the fascinating collection of case studies organisations have sent us
- Read the latest research, or take a look at our video library
- Get some great ideas from our practical resources and tools and ideas and tips
- Read stories from other people who are changing where they work for the better
What you can do depends on the influence you have in your organisation.
But the influence you have isn’t dependent on your job or position in the organisation’s hierarchy. It’s about how you relate to others, who you get to know, the way you put your point across, and your ideas and persuasiveness. Sometimes, to make something happen, all that is required is that you are willing to do it. Sometimes all it takes is a simple suggestion to which others say ‘yes, what a great idea’. Everyone may have been thinking about it, but nothing happens till someone suggests it.
What do you feel comfortable doing to make a difference?
Perhaps you are the person who make your workplace more sociable: arranging for the team to have lunch together, go out for a drink or a meal after work; starting a book club; organising softball in the park, a running club, a quiz night.
Perhaps you could go further: volunteering to join colleagues asked to complete a particular task, such as job evaluations, or benchmarking reward and recognition payments or performance markings. Perhaps you could be the office champion for diversity and inclusion, an office relocation or employee wellbeing!
All this in itself is activity that can help make your workplace better and fairer. But equally it can be about establishing your voice, finding out who else is interested in making work a better place, and getting noticed by a key leader who can help you.
Your best start is often just to talk to colleagues and find out who is up for change, and who is content with the status quo. You don’t have to be a manager or a team leader to put up a notice or send an email offering a meeting of people who want to make work better. Find out who is willing to help and get talking together about what you want to do and what you can do. And if you want to talk in confidence to someone outside your organisation, join an Engagement Explosion Action Learning Set.
Sometimes we face issues at work where we need to draw on outside help and advice. If you want to:
- put employee wellbeing on the agenda, a good place to start is our Engagement and Wellbeing paper
- find out more about reducing discrimination, bullying and harassment, and to promote diversity and inclusion at work, read our inclusiveness and unconscious bias paper, look at resources to tackle bullying and harassment on www.acas.org.uk or contact www.nationalbullyinghelpline.co.uk
- raise awareness about mental health in the workplace, contact www.mind.org.uk/workplace/mental-health-at-work/
- create more opportunities for employee voice at work, read about the employee voice enabler, and think about what might work in your organisation. Many of the mechanisms identified have come from staff ideas themselves.
