If you think staff engagement is about getting employees to accept job losses and a pay freeze don't be surprised if you are met by cynicism and disinterest. If you think staff engagement is about employees' engagement forums, intranet discussion groups or staff satisfaction surveys don't be surprised if staff don't engage or use the opportunity to moan about management.
You can't expect people to tell you what they are really thinking unless they feel it is safe to do so. So how do you create a safe work environment where people feel able to say what they are thinking without fear of being labelled a 'trouble maker' and how do you make it possible for others to challenge these views without finding themselves ostracised?
Open debate between management and staff is not a characteristic of the average organisation. As an indication of just how much self censorship is present in the typical organisation just look at how people chose not to talk about issues of race, faith and sexuality for fear of being labelled racist, homophobic, or alternatively being accused of excessive sensitivity and political correctness. There are few opportunities to discuss these issues openly with colleagues so people do not learn how to express their views without causing offence nor do people learn how to challenge appropriately. It becomes safer to say nothing but of course that doesn't change what people are thinking and what people are really thinking tends to inform their behaviour. So you can't just launch into staff engagement forums or intranet discussion groups.
Permission to say what you're thinking needs to be given from the top. Senior managers need to set the example by being prepared to explain the thinking behind their decisions. It needs to be spelt out that staff do not have to agree with decisions but they have the right to understand why they were made. This has implication for how all managers manage their staff. The real challenge when it comes to engaging staff is that this cannot be a separate exercise from the day-to-day running of the business.
Managing people is difficult. It is much easier to simply expect them to do what you tell them to do because you are the boss. However the point about staff engagement is that frontline staff have a very good understanding of what is really happening at the front end of the service and they have ideas about how things should be done. If we want people to be creative and innovative and we do because this is a way of achieving the goal of doing more with less then we have to accept that managers, even senior managers, don't always know best.
The role of management is therefore not to tell people what to do but help them do it.
Budget management and performance targets
The problem is that we have tended to promote very able professionals into management posts and then emphasised budget management and performance targets. Managers who are good at people management don't need to have a professional background in a particular service to be effective. You don't need to have been a librarian to run a library service, you don't need to have been a teacher to manage children services and you don't need to have been a social worker to manage adult care services.
You do need to be able be able to encourage, to support, to mentor and coach, to explain the bigger picture, to describe to staff at all levels what the future will look like. In addition managers need to make explicit the values that drive the business and challenge where practice does not live up to these values.
If staff engagement is to be more than meaningless mechanisms for getting feedback from staff, if staff engagement is to be more than just an opportunity to moan about "management" and if staff engagement is to be an opportunity to influence thinking and change the way things are done then two things must happen.
The organisation needs to be a safe place to say what you are thinking and the management style promoted needs to be more people focused and less budget and performance orientated. This has implications for management development, for creating opportunities for staff to explore issues and for helping staff and managers learn how to shape and influence thinking, to challenge and be challenged.
Blair McPherson was until recently a senior manager in a large local authority
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
