Sadly, surveys show that most staff and management don’t understand the business strategy. Survey results show as few as 10% of staff understand the strategy. Even in extremely well run and well-driven organizations as few as 29% of staff understand it.
Coupled with this is the fact that employee engagement levels are abysmal. Many of them barely making double digits. A survey undertaken by Gallup in 2020 shows that in the United Kingdom, 11% of staff are engaged. What are the other 89% doing?
Contributing to this very unsatisfactory situation is the fact that trust is in very short supply. The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2020 showed public trust levels in different business sectors in the UK. These ranged from a low of 46% to a high of 69%. And most of them showed deterioration over the previous year.
Also, British business leaders are falling behind where trust and confidence are concerned. Thirty-five percent (35%) of UK employees strongly agree that the employers have a clear plan of action in response to the Coronavirus. Twenty-seven percent (27%) believe that their company cares about their overall well-being. While 28% of UK employees have confidence in their leadership to successfully manage emerging challenges.
These are very low figures. So how do we reformulate our strategy so that most of our employees understand it, and engage with it, to drive us forward?
We’d love you to take the time to watch the highlights and either way here are our brief notes about what you can take away from the session ‘Time to Regenerate’:
1. Management having a significant of influence of engagement and the scores are incredibly low in what is a comprehensive survey from Gallup;
2. How written-down Policies that seek to communicate clearly at scale can turn colleagues off as they avoid the need for a conversation between people;
3. There is a need to consider the language and framing of these conversations, rather than policies, standing apart from traditional thinking and resetting for something fit for moving forward such as ‘location of work’ rather than ‘working from home’;
4. Recognising there has been a load on managers and leaders to ensure decisions have been made to ensure there is a business to return to a need now to take a time out to reframe the colleague conversation;
5. Recogising there are different perspectives across the organisation which we simplified, for the sake of a shorted insight, to demonstrate that providing a BIG PICTURE® view for each and every colleague is one way to bring back the conversation. Includes managers and leaders as demonstrated;
6. That this can be done, if you use an efficient tool, within the time and resource constraints you have;
7. Given the nature of the topic of engagement does not provide a reason to NOT apply a SMART frame around the Oppotunities identified. This helps the group sort and order their actions with an agreed timeframe. This is where divergent thinking reconverges as a take away.
With more time in your community we would make further connections, unpack details and strenghen the top Opportunities to create an action list of what comes next.
