When organisations start the journey of embedding engagement into their workplaces, the often start with creating an engagement framework.
The easy way is to fill out a template, then circulate it to staff. And then either hope they comply or force them to.
It’s not exactly the most engaging way.
Instead we’ve found much more success if you employ an engagement approach to develop your engagement strategy – because you gain employee buy-in. The strategy informs the engagement framework.
Reality check your engagement framework
And if you engage externally, you can reality check the framework to ensure it addresses the issues that your external stakeholders think are important.
As an external consultant though, it’s often easier for us because we’re external and independent.
If you’re in-house and developing an engagement framework, consider a few easy steps
Audit your engagement to date
Who is engaged, how often and on what topics?
Determine the impact of engagement on your business operations
What does your team do with the opinions heard? Does engagement make a difference to how you operate?
Engage your staff on what matters to them
If they don’t care about the look and feel of the engagement framework template, then don’t waste their time making it look perfect.
Being staff together
Make them part of the journey – but also look for ways for you to step back and listen and participate. It’s hard for internal engagement staff to facilitate the process and also be part of that process.
How will you use your engagement framework?
Most importantly though, consider what you will do with the framework.
How will your new process impact on the people in your organisation? How will you change internal culture? And how will you measure if the framework is working?
Yep, this is the time to remind you that if you don’t build the groundwork for evaluation at the framework stage, you’ll probably never evaluate.
