10 top takeaways from a day of employee engagement

This year’s London Employee Engagement Summit saw leading practitioners from GSK, Seasalt Cornwall, TATA, ZSL and more share their thoughts with the 700 delegates.

As Chair, I want to share with you my 10 top takeaways from the day to help improve employee engagement in your business.

  1. Segment your audience so content is relevant, focus on what it is your audience wants to know and deliver it with a consistent tone of voice.
  2. To engage employees with change, start with the business problem you are trying to solve then tell that story tailored to what you know matters to your audience. Keep on telling it otherwise people will make up their own version.
  3. If you’re going to ask your employees what they think, do something with it and feedback. Avoid an ‘always listening’ strategy becoming an ‘always asking’ strategy which disengages.
  4. You’ll get great results if you involve employees – in scoping culture and shaping behaviours.
  5. Employees will leave unchallenging work, not challenging workloads. And, yes, employees really do leave bad managers.
  6. Don’t believe the hype! There’s not as much AI use in HR yet as we might think. Only 10% are actually using it to any great extent.
  7. Still seeing strong evidence of the positive impact of people focussed HR on profitability, productivity, revenue, employee retention.
  8. Rules for replacing annual appraisals Have near term goals 2. Give feedback ASAP after the event 3. Have regular, future focussed conversations 4. Meaningful dialogue rather than form filling.
  9. A shared and common purpose really does drive engagement – we can all create our own versions of the NASA JFK janitor story
  10. Emotional intelligence and authenticity are key leadership skills. New social media tools can allow senior leaders to ‘walk the floor’ at scale.

Image credit  – NASA

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