17 May 2010
Melcrum Employee Engagement conference 2010: Putting communication at the forefront of engagement and performance
Last week, saw Melcrum's 6th annual Employee Engagement conference roll around once again. An engaging day to say the least, with communicators from CCE, Santander UK and Siemens Plc., talking about how they engage their employees. If you weren't lucky enough to attend, worry not, we bring you some of the highlights over the two-day period.
Low levels of employee engagement are endemic in today’s recession-bruised business climate. This, in turn, has resulted in lacklustre performance on critical tasks, seen company costs soar and created widespread customer dissatisfaction. No business has been free of the issue and nor is it likely to disappear.
To help communicators address, tackle, solve and execute some of the biggest challenges businesses and communication teams have faced and are still facing, Melcrum held its sixth annual two-day Employee Engagement conference last week with more than 100 practitioners debating the key issues at the Bloomsbury Hotel in London. The event, one of the most popular on Melcrum’s conference calendar, gave communicators the chance to share best practice and fresh ideas, as well as the opportunity to gain an insight into how their peers are engaging their audiences. The two-days had one of the strongest line-up of speakers ever seen at Melcrum’s engagement conference with companies including Mothercare, Dow Corning, GKN, Involve, WMW, Santander, Coca Cola Enterprises, Motorola, Mars, NHS, Siemens, Wincanton, and London Overground Rail Operations, all of whom covered a wide range of engagement stories and strategies.
Engaging on a budget
The event gave communicators the chance to share best practice, fresh ideas, and the opportunity to gain an insight into how their peers are engaging their audiences.
Day one kicked off with a lively joint keynote presentation from Wayne Clarke, managing partner, Best Companies Partnership, and Rob Jones, head of learning and development at Mothercare. Extolling the virtues of what engagement can do for business, Jones described how the British retailer, that jumped eight places from 13th to fifth in the 2009 Sunday Times Best Companies to Work annual survey, managed to significantly improve employee engagement within its workforce and increase profit, all on an engagement budget of zero, during turbulent times. Read here to see how they did it.
Other highlights included Simon Hardaker, director, group employee communications at GKN, facilitating a live interactive session with delegates to give them a real sense of how GKN used voting pads to measure engagement while creating conversation, transparency and trust between managers and employees. Interactive voting was also used by Involve and its managing director Jeremy Starling during a live Primer Ministerial-style debate during which the consultancy asked delegates to carry the motion for or against the question of whether or not employee engagement has “lost its soul”. The overall consensus was that engagement was even more vital when operating during tough economic conditions.
In the afternoon Neil Jenkins, European communications manager, described how Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) broadened its employee engagement activity into CSR related issues, following survey results that showed CSR as one of the biggest drivers of engagement at the bottle manufacturing company. In 2008, CCE launched a companywide internal engagement program in Europe entitled ‘CSR in Action’. A week-long program included seminars and daily bulletins themed around its five CSR strategic focus areas, and community engagement projects, as well as developing an internal CSR website that provides a forum for ideas and discussions and resources. Jenkins explained that by 2009, a captive audience had been formed. The following year CSR in Action Week was even bigger and better, even seeing seven employees living on a carbon budget for a month and blogging about their progress. This was read by over 7,000 employees. Jenkins, revealed that today, 77 percent of employees say they’re proud to work at CCE.
Using a lean model for a successful framework?
Day two maintained the high energy and momentum of day one. Jennifer Schulte, global engagement director at Mars, got things underway with a fantastic keynote presentation, describing how the global food giant had calculated that actively disengaged employees, or “associates” as they’re known, were costing Mars $500 million with eight out of 10 of the poorest performing plants in North America. Find out how these scores were turned around here.
Using the lean model, Siemens has been successful in building a new framework around the line manager – employee relationship.
Swiftly following Schulte’s inspiring keynote, Jack Winters, head of internal communications, at Siemens UK explained to delegates how business excellence, communication and HR can work together to achieve engagement. The company is also part of Melcrum’s flagship benchmarking and research group The Strategic Research Forum. Winters and his colleague Jonathan Blackburn, business improvement facilitator, went through the fascinating topic of how to best make an organization “lean” and the lean process improvement methodology. In essence, and as Benjamin Franklin once said, “Watch the small things because a small leak can sink a big ship”. Blackburn has studied various methods of turning Siemens into a lean organization including the “Toyota Way” where since the middle of last century the Asian car manufacturer has sought continuous improvement.
For Siemens this has translated into now continuously examining a pyramid of quality, delivery and costs and ensuring that everything it produces meets these three core criteria. Using the lean model, Siemens has been successful in building a new framework around the line manager – employee relationship.
Last but by no means least was Rachel Allen’s excellent case study on how she was employed as head of communications at London Overground, otherwise known as LOROL, to start the communications function from scratch. Previously run by Silverlink, the London Overground system had been labelled the “Forgotten Railway” by the British press. The huge network that runs around the UK’s capital city was badly managed, in a state of disrepair and full of disengaged staff. Allen had a huge task on her hands but she, along with many of the staff have taken it upon themselves to change its internal and external image, seek guidance, examine its proud past and how far they’ve come and celebrate the fact that billions of pounds of investment have been pumped into the project to transform the East London Line – one of the flagship projects being opened on May 23 in preparation for the London Olympics in 2012. The whole world will be watching in less than two years time and they can hopefully now build on Allen’s great work.
Today, her four principles (see below), have meant that 25.8% more employees were found to agree that are well informed about what’s happening at LOROL and feel part of its bright future.
Allen’s four communication principles:
- Helping employees understand the business context for change.
- Overcoming the resistance to time-honoured practices.
- Encouraging employees to contribute to decision-making.
- Communicating with family fun days, printed communication and embedding new learning.
Have your say
What's your organization doing to engage employees post-recession? Do you think employee enagement has lost its soul? Are you working with other departments to acheive engagement? Share your thoughts on the topic with us below.
Recommended resources:
TOOL: Siemens’ leadership framework
A cycle of engagement between employees and customers
TOP TIPS: Change communication no-nos
Got a news story? Contact the newsdesk