The What Goes Around Blog

Disengaged

I may be wrong, I often am.

My heart sank with yesterday’s news that the UK Government has launched a taskforce to boost employee engagement. Read that sentence again and tell me it doesn’t reek of despair. However well meaning this taskforce is I shudder when government, any government, starts fiddling with the concept of making work better. There’s a huge industry chuntering out surveys and magic numbers and other guff purporting to be about discretionary effort (that means working harder for no more money). Kevin Ball has written a storming post on engagement surveys which is well worth a read.

This taskforce is to be headed by David MacLeod, an eminent speaker and writer on this subject. I know he’s an eminent writer because I have a stack of ten copies of Engaging for Success (co authored by MacLeod and Nita Clarke and contributed to by me and doubtless hundreds of others) now doubling up as a footstool in my office. Engagingly supportive. And I know that MacLeod is a highly polished speaker on the subject of employee engagement. I’ve seen him speak several times over the years (including once at a conference I disorganised in April 2010) and he’s good at it. Trouble is it feels stuck. It’s the same story, using the same slides, same jokes, same pleas. I am not yet convinced he has the vigour and rigour to drive this along purposefully. Mind you I’m unsure anyone could drive this in a useful way unless that by useful you mean appeasing government bureaucracy, or driving the whole damn thing off a cliff.

I believe engagement is simple, and that doesn’t mean it is easy.

I think I’ll set up a counter taskforce! I already have an army of HR undead massed at the gates of engagement. War is declared – let battle come down.

engagement ninjas we are ready to fight!

Keen to know what other folks think about this. Are you up for more government sponsored plodding or shall we try a more agile, exciting kick ass way to engage with meaning?

photo c/o carloscappaticci

Open Plan Office

We have so much fabulous open plan office space available to us it is mind boggling. I don’t mean we as in us at What Goes Around, I mean we as in all of us, you included. I walked past one of my offices today. It’s called Stanley Park and it is en route from my house to the station. As the better weather comes around I often use these huge open plan offices for work and meetings. They are a fantastic alternative to those boxy hemmed in things you often find in buildings. Why do I like them?

Change of scene. Isn’t it fantastic to get different perspectives on things? And what better way to help that along than to make the meeting backdrop a series of different perspectives. Need I say more?

Room to roam. There was some great discussion round here recently about stand up meetings. How about walking and strolling meetings? These can be really useful when getting to know folk better.

No PowerPoint. Have you ever seen a PowerPoint presentation in a park? I mean – seriously, this reason alone does it for me.

I belong to a LinkedIn group called HR at the Table. It’s run by the wonderfully creative Vandy Massey and the group meets monthly for lunch and good conversation. I just found out that there are plans to make at least one of the summer meet ups a walking meeting. Sounds fun and I’m looking forward to it.

And yes I know, meetings are about much more than their surroundings. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the effort to make those surroundings as stimulating as we can, does it?

photo c/o bradleygee

Drawn to the Moment

Here’s an enjoyable and useful way to spend a few minutes. Grab a sketch pad and a nice soft pencil and spend just a very few minutes drawing someone. In the examples you can see here folks in a workshop last week spent exactly ten minutes drawing me. Before sitting down to draw we had spent a few minutes in a gallery looking at the way artists use different materials to capture their subjects.

There was reasoning behind this drawing exercise. Most importantly it is fun. It is also for most people a chance to experience something a little different and it is another way of helping folks to focus on a particular task. Sometimes you don’t have very long to do the task – can you capture the essence of what you need in a brief period of time? I think these results show you that the answer is yes.

We developed the idea a little further and had another play with the sketching pencils. This time we only had two minutes to complete the task. It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind and your pencil to it. What do you do when you need to focus, when you don’t have long to complete a task?