Do the senior leaders in your business see employee engagement as just a tick box exercise?

Because part of their assessment is the annual staff survey, they are keen to get everyone completing that – and get high engagement scores. But the survey tells us that people are engaged with the organisation, not [with] senior leadership. It’s their work and the public sector ethos that they are engaged with so they get their work done despite lacklustre leadership. There is a lack of strong leadership skills, they don’t really understand true engagement and how much more they could achieve if they did.

[Leaders] think that as they are so passionate about the business, everyone else automatically is.

It’s all to do with leadership – if my boss challenges me, supports me, that’s where engagement lives. Most leaders think they are paying good attention to employee engagement but for the most part they want to just get the changes through as quickly as possible, communicating only what is necessary so as to avoid perceived risks of the changes failing if employees know too much too soon. We all know from evidence and experience that changes fail mostly because of lack of communication and understanding but despite the evidence, leaders tend to go the first route and just force changes through.

Employee engagement is critical to business success and, as a new company bringing together two cultures, engagement and the views of our staff are critical. Engaged employees also perform better which increases company performance. We have an open two-way culture which is great but actually encouraging people to ask the real tough questions us challenging.
 

Is all this talk about corporate purpose just internal spin?
It’s the wrong question. It can become spin; just like values, vision, mission. More importantly than anything, it can connect the company and employees to the impact the organisation has on society. Or if it is spin, it quickly becomes corporate wallpaper.

I think there is a grain of truth in it, but I also think companies get on these bandwagons as they think it’s the thing to do.

Slightly disingenuous, but everyone like to think that their business has a reason for existing now and
in the future. The scepticism is in what we call this; Vision, Mission, Purpose? The pedantic amongst us will be specific about what each of these mean, but your average employee might use these words interchangeably to describe why their employer exists.

It should be at the heart of what we are doing – the internal spin only applies if it is not believed at the leadership level.

If a company is united behind a clear purpose, and its employees understand their role in delivering that purpose, their jobs have a clear meaning. If a company doesn’t know why it exists in the first place, how do they fully agree upon strategy?

Individuals can have a purpose, corporates have missions - trying to wrap up all those little things into a purpose - it’s jargon and will swiftly lose meaning.

What skills does an internal communicator need to have?

Annabel Dunstan, co-founder, Question & Retain says, “An IC pro needs to be many things, but in the top three I’d say a sleuth, a translator and a juggler. As a sleuth, an IC needs to get under the skin of the business, to discover who is feeling and thinking what about every aspect of the organisation they work for. As a translator, great ICs know how to create messages that land well with the intended audience, first by listening and understanding what they want to know and hear and then by translating what it is that senior teams wish to disseminate. As a juggler, the best ICs can prioritise, focus on the important without the urgent taking over.