Reflecting on #CIPD12

I’ve had an interesting and fun couple of days in Manchester at the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition last week. One of the most compelling reasons why I think people go to conferences is the interaction with other people. I’m no exception and I loved catching up with friends and meeting lots more people for the first time. What else struck me about this event?

The Exhibition versus The Conference

The exhibition and conference although both under one main roof, are very separate in Manchester. It feels like people are just passing through, heads down, avoiding eye contact. And often, exhibitions have a bad reputation as places stalked by pushy sales people, I get that.

In an attempt to check this feeling out, I chose to spend plenty of time on the exhibition floor this year. I found a good number of people who wanted to talk, in context with what they were selling and promoting sure, and importantly, in context with the themes that were emerging from the conference too. Plenty of people with a smile, a job to do and sense of wanting to engage with others rather than try and push product. I’m sure there were pushy people there too but I was fortunate not to meet any.

Later in the event I revisited some of the stands where I’d previously been made welcome to see how they were finding things. The feedback was along the lines of ‘yes, we’re having a good event, making new contacts and we’ve had some interesting enquiries about what we do too’. I’m sure not everyone on a stand had a good time but applying my thoroughly unscientific approach of going where I was made welcome and I didn’t feel hassled, worked for me. If you’ve avoided the exhibition floor of late at conferences – maybe you should check it out again?

On my visit to the Ohio State HR Conference in September this year, the conference organising committee did a great job of encouraging conference visitors to invest time at the exhibition. Ohio guests give feedback that the event is great value for money and the committee are quick to recognise that this is in part due to the sponsorship the exhibitors provide. There’s much more too, content, networking, and enthusiasm enough for all, but the link between conference and exhibition is acknowledged very healthily. Another thing I noted in Ohio was that many of the announcements and regroups between talks were staged in the middle of the exhibition. Perhaps there’s something for the CIPD in these observations?

Pot Luck

Because I was spending more time on the exhibition floor I didn’t get to nearly so many conference talks this year as I’ve done before. One I did make it to was ‘Maintaining Employee Engagement Through SME Growth’. Now for sure – this session wasn’t going to win the snappy title award but it was a very engaging panel discussion. Jill Miller from the CIPD sparked some good conversation between Clive Hutchinson of Cougar Automation, Hazel Stimpson of Harrod UK, and Lesley Cotton from P&O Ferries.

All the panellists were lively and spoke plainly and simply about stuff like involvement, helping people see the bigger picture (damn those siloes), and the demise of individual bonuses in favour of profit share (a la John Lewis). You can read more about what Flora Marriott thought specifically of Clive here, and I share her disappointment that this session didn’t reach a wider audience. It might have been by people with SME experience, but it certainly wasn’t just for them.

So why pot luck? Well ordinarily I might have been put off this session by the title but I chose to take a step into the unknown and I benefited from that. Sadly – I picked up some vibes on Twitter that not all the sessions were so useful and enjoyable. That brings me to another aspect of pot luck. As a conference delegate you rarely know, even if you’re grabbed by the session title, how good the speaker(s) will be. Sure, if you’ve seen them before you’ll have an idea and often we don’t have the benefit of that previous experience.

At this point Flora gets another mention, and so too do Darren Hockaday, Tom Paisley and Perry Timms. I listened to all these people speak, and plenty more besides, and these four in particular had some interesting things in common.

  • They had prepared
  • They spoke with conviction
  • They were funny at times

OK the being funny bit may not be essential, though I think it really helps – but the other two points, without them I think you’re always going to struggle to get a result. So if you are invited to speak, I encourage you to see that as a gift and work hard to make the experience as good as you possibly can, for your audience and for you. In the delivery, try and convey a sense of enjoyment. It’s contagious, and it beats miserable every time. When I get a miserable speaker in front of me, that’s a sure fire early depart.

Blogging

To close this post, I want to acknowledge the tip top bloggers at the event, and thumbs up to the CIPD for their continued support of the rise of the HR bloggers here in the UK. Here are links to the ones I know about. If I’ve missed anyone – shout and I’ll stick you on the list.

Mervyn Dinnen

Rob Jones

Flora Marriott

Neil Morrison

Sukh Pabial

FlipChartRick

 

Positively Psyched

Happy Monday y’all. Seeing as how today is not many folks fave day of the week I thought I’d kick things off on some positive notes to help get you in your stride.

MeetMeMe

I recently had a great customer experience courtesy of MeetMeMe. I found out about these unusual business cards after seeing a post on Facebook by Dawn Hrdlica Burke about them. I went to order a pack and they are US shipment only. I dropped them a nice note to say how cool I thought their product was and they kindly agreed to ship me some. Sweeeeeeet!

We’re going one step further and offering five sets of cards as give aways over at our Facebook page. All you have to do is head over there, give us a like and then get ready to be quick off the mark around 2pm on Thursday 19th July to nab yourself a pack of your own MeetMeMe trading cards.

Sukh Pabial

Sukh is on an adventure. A step on that adventurous journey is his Positive Psychology in Application event in London on Friday August 17th. You can find out more about the event here and I’m pleased to let you know that we have two tickets to give away. All you have to do is add a comment to this post asking for a ticket and if you are the first or second person to do so – bingo! I’ll then put you in touch with Sukh and you can take it from there.

John Junson

John is the network cartoonist and designer over at David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Network. He created the design and colours for the network. He created our unique symbol/brand. He designed all the free e-books. He has been involved in this work before it went online over four years ago. His birthday is July 21 and we want to see if we can have the community at 5000 members for his birthday.

Please help. If you have not joined, join today. I’ve been a member for a few years and enjoyed lots of useful learning and sharing, and membership is free.

To join the network, click here.

So there you have it – three positives to kick off your week. Happy Monday!

Beehive yourself

Yesterday a bunch of us met up with David Zinger for a workshop titled “Think different inside our hives – How to achieve exceptional employee engagement”. The event was generously sponsored by Berghind Joseph. I’ve corresponded with David for some time now via email, blog posts and his Employee Engagement Network so I was very keen to meet him in person.

Thinking different inside our hives

We were intriguingly offered as much likelihood of puzzlement and muddlement, as clarity. As someone who believes that no one knows what they are doing I was excited by the possibilities, and I will try to recall some snippets of possibility for you now.

Invitational

Engagement is invitational. You can’t make people do it, they have to want to. Engagement as a program is a recipe for disaster.

Engagement is not a problem to solve; it is an experience to be lived

David’s a great story teller. I’m not going to attempt to retell all his tales from yesterday, but here’s a stab at one for you. David comes across a guy unhappy in his work. So unhappy that he is literally counting the days until he can retire. David asks him, “So is there anything you do like?” “Yeah, golf”, comes the reply. David remarks that given Canada only has about a three month golf season it probably isn’t the best country to have golf as your like. The guy retires. Some time later David sees him in the street on a lovely sunny afternoon, looking as miserable as ever. “Did you play golf?” he asks. “yeah, and I hate it” comes the reply. From this encounter we learn that “Engagement is not a problem to solve; it is an experience to be lived”.

Small is the new significant

I often ask myself and others – what is the least I can do today to make a positive impact. David spoke about how engagement is less about a return on investment, more about ensuring it is worth the risk. And a way to reduce risk is to keep things small. Small is the new significant, as long as we stand for the significant. Pilots are great; you often don’t need permission for pilots (and if you do it’s usually much quicker to obtain)

Bees

David is conducting an interesting experiment with bees. Zinghive is dedicated to co-creating organisations, businesses, and social networking through parallel play and metaphoric understanding of honey bees and hives. The project will culminate in the summer of 2012 with an interaction between bees, social media, and computers. Following that there will be exhibits, presentations, and implications for organisations as we learn to think differently inside the hive.

We learned that as the queen bee reaches the end of her useful life, other bees “cook the queen”. They do this by crowding her and beating their wings to raise the temperature around the queen until she dies. He suggests that employees do this to projects they don’t believe in. Maybe not by beating their wings, but if they’re not engaged in the project, it will get cooked. David said that there are bloggers in the audience today and for all he knows, he may get roasted after today…

Resisting change

Folks don’t resist change, they resist coercion to change. It must be invitational, and we must be mindful that the gravity of the familiar pulls you back.

Table talk

We spent some time discussing and maybe debunking, some engagement myths. We did this in small groups which were regularly broken up and reformed. Here are just a few thoughts which emerged from the conversations I was a part of:

Engagement is like water, you can’t push it but you can create inclines and receptacles into which it can flow.

We need more fools! (just be careful not to make the queen too angry, you don’t want to hear “off with his head!”)

Is engagement love?

We own engagement individually. In the past companies had a quality department. Nowadays everyone owns quality. That’s how it should be with engagement.

Terminology

David said, “I hate the term employee engagement, but it’s here and we work with it”. I don’t like it either and as regular readers know I’m up for simply making work better. Choose your label.

Energy

Engagement needs to return more energy than it demands or it is unsustainable.

The end of engagement

The concept will end. Hopefully because it becomes integrated, not because it was the previous fad. Taskforces, add ons, programmes make extra work. There is no way to engagement, it is the way.

What makes engagement?

Progress – probably the biggest single factor. People need to know and see they are making progress. David spoke about Albert (Stonewall) Johnson, who built the great wall of Saskatchewan. After building it for ten years, Johnson’s wife declared him nuts. She left him, and five years later, he declared himself nuts too. And he kept on going, making progress. What is your legacy, what will you leave behind?

High quality connections – choose to make contact, to say hello. David spoke about Jane Dutton, whose research focuses on how organizational conditions strengthen capabilities of individuals and firms.  In particular, she examines how high quality connections, positive meaning and emotions contribute to individual and organizational strengths. David said that his observations of how many (or how few) folks acknowledge and engage with a front desk in an organisation, tells him a lot about their high quality connections, and how it is around here. My friend Sukh Pabial wrote something about this which I consider to be recommended reading – you may want to take a look.

And it is important these connections aren’t all nicey nicey. Engagement means being confident to hold people to account. Checking in with them, not checking up on them.

Surveys

When was the last time you heard of a company which allowed the staff to ask what should be in the staff survey?

Never do anything about me, without me.

What about an open creative commons survey? Companies are enslaved to expensive surveys because they (wrongly in my opinion) look for comparative data. Seeing this as valuable presumes that what works here, works there too. It may, and it may not.

Anonymity is not an engagement problem it is a safety problem. When did it become acceptable not to want to know who we are? When I used to work at BT I used to plaster my name all over the verbatim comments. I figured if I had an opinion and I wanted to help then how the hell was anyone going to progress things if they didn’t know who I was? BT then used to go through the data and religiously remove mine and others names. I found that offensive, and I still do. Forced anonymity sucks!

Value

A value is a promise. Live it, be it, behave it and it becomes strong.

Essence

Community trumps organisation

Half of what I say is right, half is wrong and I don’t know the difference

I reserve the right to change my mind

Progress

High quality connections

Invitations

A value is a promise

Bees are cool