Engagement – Page 33 – The Consulting Artist

Career Opportunities

I never cease to be amazed and delighted at the variety of work I get offered, and I’ve landed another fantastic gig. I’ve been invited to facilitate a bring your daughters and sons to work day for a financial services company.This is going to be pure excitement mixed with a dash of chaos,

All week the kids have been sending me cool facts about themselves. Favourite colour, favourite activities (annoying boys is in the lead at the moment!), and best things about school (Maths and Thinking Actively in a Social Context are both sounding good).

We’re going to play investment games. We’ll be visiting a market, making business cards, telling stories about what the mums and dads do and how it all fits together. There will be art stuff going on and the kids are going to have their own board meeting so they can tell us what good work should look like.

The kids are aged between 8 and 14 and I’d like to have plenty of things for them to do to keep the boredom at bay.

Can you help with this please?

What ideas and suggestions can you make that we could throw into the mix? Here’s your chance to pretend to be a kid again – grab that chance and chuck as much fun at me as you like. I need your ideas today please – what are you waiting for?

Photo c/o lrargerich

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