The story goes that happy people make happy customers – which make happy profits. How does that work really?
Delivering change, achieving new results, creating a culture that attracts great new recruits, getting the best from every individual and even having effective meetings – these are all challenges that can be boiled down to engagement.
The best bit about engagement is that it leads to higher performance and higher retention, so you could see better results and ideally even keep your best talent.
All the research on employee engagement and high performing teams suggests we’re looking for a combination of working to strengths and having a supportive environment.
Our research on people at their best (Addicott 2015) also suggests there needs to be a combination of feeling great (self belief, confidence etc) and doing great (taking personal responsibility, going the extra mile etc). No surprises there. But what do we do with this information?
Aside from simply measuring where people are on engagement and performance, we work with organisations and teams to focus on how they’re feeling and what they’re doing to create not only high engagement, but people at their best.
A lot of this comes down to our managers – how they make us feel and what environment they provide for us to work in. Then there is the part of inspirational communication. How do our managers and leaders tell the story of where we’re headed? Are people inspired to act?
Our work on personal impact, conferences and story-telling makes use of principles from theatre and the hero’s journey – delivering a message that achieves the purpose of engagement and delivery.