WASP males don’t tend to get too many invitations to be involved in the promotion of diversity management; which is a shame really.  I’m a firm believer in the notion that the promotion of diversity should embrace the full range of stakeholders; it should truly practice inclusiveness in the way stakeholders are engaged with the philosophy or it runs the risk of being seen as a marginal activity aimed at an exclusive audience.  A “push” communication approach may be one of the reasons why the diversity flag bearers within organisations sometimes find themselves struggling for real influence at the top table.

But this thought piece isn’t to critique the notion of diversity or challenge its increasing relevance to the organisation development and employee engagement agenda. I would like to share a rare moment of Belgian enlightenment.

Picture the scene.  The wonderful and irrepressibly inspirational Myrtha Casanova of the The European Institute for Managing Diversity had enlisted my help to co-facilitate a workshop she was running with the senior executives of a global producer of cereal crops and foodstuffs.  They had been embroiled in a PR war with NGOs and pressure groups worldwide because of controversial growing techniques and what was perceived as an arrogant communication stance.

The workshops were intended to develop diversity strategies across their global businesses.  Most of their senior executives were gathered in Belgium to that end – and they weren’t very pleased about it.

It was soon clear that their beleaguered HR Director had been forced into developing a diversity strategy by the board who were in turn responding to US legislation.  The executive cadre encamped in Belgium were 90% male, mostly of Anglo Saxon origin and frankly, felt they had much more pressing priorities.  In short, the workshops quickly regressed into trench warfare.

The turning point came, however, shortly after lunch on day one when, rather than push more and more statistics, facts and process at the group, we adopted a less evangelical approach and asked them to explore their brand from the customer’s perspective. 

They had traditionally seen themselves as a business to business organisation but it took one of the more junior managers, who also happened to have the largest team and who also happened to be a woman, to point out that housewives could make or break their company.  By drawing a simple supply chain model she was able to quickly illustrate the route their product ultimately followed to market and how it was immaterial that they weren’t putting the bread on the shelves themselves. Women still make the vast majority of purchasing decisions per household and the retailers were reliant upon their suppliers to provide raw materials in tune with the ethics and values of the consumer.  An epiphany!

This simple, jaw-dropping moment proves to be a revelation for her cynical peers who had clearly spent years developing competencies and promoting values appropriate for managing their equally macho purchasing managers in the businesses they were selling to.  Suddenly the link between organisational culture and their PR problems was put into stark relief. More importantly, they realised that, without a more representative management structure they would make similar mistakes.  The business case for diversity had become clear and the rest of the session was put to productive use developing a central and local diversity policy, strategy and engagement approach which owed much to a loaf of bread!

If you want to find out more about the EIMD (a not for profit organisation founded in 1996, with headquarters in Barcelona and which operates across the European Union), take a look at their website http://www.iegd.org/englishok/who.htm

Or feel free to drop me a line and I’ll tell you more about this and similar stories.

Ian@by2w.co.uk

It’s unfortunate that most of the growing army of critics weighing down the creaking

employee engagement bandwagon come from the camp of the bleeding heart.  They’re the

ones with the “staff are our greatest asset” t-shirts who trot out unsubstantiated clichés about obligations, rights and respect. Sadly they damage rather than help their cause by undermining the credibility of the people-focused functions through failing to work with the prevailing culture in order to influence that culture for the better.

The fact is that there’s a far more compelling case for employee engagement and culture development than empathy and magnanimousness.  Finance directors seldom liberate budgets without a compelling business case. It’s also a fact that, unlike much external investment, the majority of culture development and internal brand engagement activity is reliant upon discretionary spend. We all know how hard it is to loosen the discretionary purse strings in the good times let alone in a downturn.

So how do you build a business case for employee engagement? I believe it’s important to keep things as simple as possible.  David Bolchover, for example, in his book The Living Dead*, states that in the UK alone, doctor’s receive over 9 million “suspect” requests for sick notes per year (equivalent to the entire population of Sweden).  In addition one in three midweek visitors to a major theme park are pulling a sickie from work.  Do the maths for your organisation and you’ll soon have the makings of your own business case for engaging employees in the business by engaging them with the brand.

If this is still too abstract, you could adopt the en vogue concept of employer brand as your starting point.  Employer brand is shorthand for the brand projected to employees and recruits. It is reliant upon the close management of key people processes like recruitment, induction, performance management and internal communication. Employee engagement and employer brand are very close bedfellows and the business case for investing in either should be built on a platform that includes:

-          The true cost of recruitment and retention (including agency fees, salaries, advertising, induction and orientation etc)

-          The cost of non-conformance (This is the impact of failing to fulfil brand promises to employees and new recruits.  It is not just whether recruitment partners in the supply chain perform but whether your recruitment professionals are recruiting to a model based upon the desired future culture rather than fit with the existing culture. In the UK alone around approximately 365 million pounds is wasted on ineffective graduate hires**)

-          The impact of creeping brand death and deadweight (What percentage of your employees turn up but have switched off or worse still, have switched allegiance? If you have employee surveys do they role model your brand values in the way they are implemented? How do they feed back into strategy and are you even bothering to measure employee engagement properly?)

As Steve McKevitt illustrates in City Slackers***, spotting the brand dead is a tricky task to implement from the heady heights of the C suite. But if I tell you that a group of disengaged public sector employees recently brought down their own CEO by leaking their version of the stories their Communications Director had carefully spoonfed the press you’ll get the idea about how important it is. Now picture how long and how widely these disaffected individuals had been bad mouthing the organisation and the impact on internal morale as well as public opinion. Time to start dusting down those surveys or reprioritising that engagement research?

 Ian

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is an organisation development process or philosophy that engages individuals within an organizational in its turnaround, renewal, change and focused performance.

It’s a particular way of asking questions and envisioning the future that fosters positive relationships and builds on the basic goodness in a person, a situation, or an organization. Put another way, it’s an approach that believes in the power of positive thinking and seeks to draw out the superhero in every employee rather than a self-fulfilling belief that all employees are scheming super villains.

Used effectively, it enhances an organisation’s capacity for collaboration and change.  It’s a fantastic way of signaling an energising alternative to the depressing and draining, downsizing mentality of a recession.

Appreciative Inquiry utilizes a cycle of 4 processes focusing on:

1. DISCOVER: The identification of organizational processes that work well.
2. DREAM: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.
3. DESIGN: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.
4. DESTINY (or DELIVER): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design.

Even the headings are inspirational.

The basic idea is to build organizations around what works, rather than just trying to fix what doesn’t. It is the opposite of problem solving. Instead of focusing on gaps and inadequacies to find blame and remediate skills or practices, AI focuses on how to create more of the occasional exceptional performance that is occurring (and there will be examples), regardless of conditions, because a core of strengths is aligned.

The approach acknowledges the contribution of individuals, in order to increase trust and inspire best practice. The method aims to create meaning by drawing from stories of concrete successes with the potential of becoming best practices and lends itself to cross-functional social activities. It can be enjoyable and natural to many managers, who, let’s face it, are often sociable people when they come out from behind the badge.

There are a variety of approaches to implementing Appreciative Inquiry, including mass-mobilized interviews and a large, diverse gathering called an Appreciative Inquiry Summit Both approaches involve bringing very large, diverse groups of people together to study and build upon the best in an organization or community.

The basic philosophy of AI is also found in other positively oriented approaches to individual change as well as organizational change. AI fosters positive relationships and builds on the basic goodness in a person, or a situation. The idea of building on strength, rather than just focusing on faults and weakness is a powerful idea in use in mentoring programs, and excellent performance evaluations – where superheroes come into their own.

If you’re wondering what to do with your employee survey and are a little nervous about how any internal benchmarking activity will be received; if you’ve had enough of the pessimism and would like to know more about the power of Appreciative Inquiry or just need a hand spotting those brand champions quietly battling the economic doom and gloom, get in touch. We’re happy to share ideas.

ian@by2w.co.uk