Leading Workplace Innovation – Practitioner Course

The Workplace Diagnostic will help you acquire an in-depth understanding of where change is needed in order to enhance engagement and performance.

It focuses on workplace practices that enable people at every level to use and develop their full range of skills, knowledge, experience and creativity. The Diagnostic enables you to align individual jobs, teams, line management, organisational structures, processes, learning, innovation processes and leadership around common principles and values.

The Diagnostic is a unique, on-line employee survey tool, solidly based in research evidence and practical experience. It asks employees and managers to identify their day-to-day experiences of four ‘Elements’, or bundles of workplace practices strongly associated with high performance, engagement and employee health and well-being:

• Jobs and Teams
• Organisational Structures, Management and Processes
• Improvement and Innovation
• Leadership and Employee Voice.

Unlike traditional engagement surveys, the Diagnostic provides a clear indication of where changes are needed to achieve this synergy, including the interdependent practices that will affect outcomes. It can be used across the whole company, at department or division level, and/or in individual teams of 10 or more.

The results, shown as red, amber or green scores for 11 specific areas of working practice, indicate the potential for targeted change or consolidation. Findings are broken down by department, team, professional group or other variables provided by you. Discrepancies between senior manager perceptions and employee experience of working practices are also calculated. Findings are correlated with separate engagement, health and well-being scores, enabling users to identify the most effective levers for improvement.

Results from the Workplace Diagnostic are translated into a practical, online action plan template, enabling users to create a clear strategy for effective and sustainable change.

I can understand from the Diagnostic what the genuine pulse of the business is and how it feels. I don’t think I would have done that previously, I would have just kept on blindly continuing thinking everything’s good.
Rob Cowman, Engineering Director, East Coast Oil & Gas

We were aware of issues we were seeing in the company just starting to come to the surface. And all of a sudden there was a method of measuring that. We could start to do something about it. Once you can measure it, you can actually analyse it and do something about it.
Martin Welsh, MD, Booth Welsh

We should stop pretending that Engagement surveys deliver any change and much less sustainable transformation. This diagnostic identifies where workplace practice can be improved and in doing so delivers a better culture and engagement.
Sue Evans, Former HR Director, Warwickshire County Council

You will design and deliver an Innovation Project as core part of the Workplace Innovation Practitioner Programme. Your Project will deliver real benefits to your organisation as well as building your own knowledge, skills and experience through ‘learning by doing’.

We provide a customised Action Plan template as a key resource to support you at every stage of your Innovation Project, from inception to evaluation. Your Action Plan will help you design and prepare your Innovation Project, identify and implement key milestones, and assess the outcomes both for your organisation and for your personal learning. The Action Plan also forms part of your assessment as a Workplace Innovation Practitioner.

Use and update the Action Plan regularly as you progress through the Programme’s modules, and as you engage people throughout your organisation in the change process. The resulting plan and its implementation will be a collaborative effort involving many people in your workplace, inspired and informed by the knowledge and insights that you will gain from the Programme.

Throughout the programme, participants receive continuous support from the Workplace Innovation team through video conferencing and online interaction in the Lab. Optional in-house workshops, facilitation, coaching and review meetings can also help with problem-solving, securing leadership and employee buy-in, and turning new ideas into practical action. An interesting example of a facilitation visit by the Workplace Innovation team can be found here.

The programme is underpinned by extensive online learning resources describing each aspect of workplace innovation, enhanced with case examples and practical tools. Each module includes interactive forums enabling you to share ideas and experiences with other programme participants and the entire Fresh Thinking Labs community. You will also find a series of Learning Log questions which you must complete in order to gain accreditation.

The best leaders are constant learners. Action Learning can help participants in the Workplace Innovation Practitioner Programme to become part of a learning eco-system, engaging with different perspectives and thinking creatively and critically.

Action Learning is a way of helping to implement changes and actions, taking people beyond superficial analysis and facilitating deep learning for individuals and the set. It is an action-based process informed by the idea that there is ‘no learning without action and no action without learning’.

The Workplace Innovation Practitioner Programme enables you to explore and understand the generic principles of what makes a good organisation, and then to reinvent them within the specific context of your own workplace. This process of workplace innovation is about participation, experimentation and shared learning – in other words there is no blueprint. Stimulating workplace innovation and driving it forward can be an invigorating experience but it comes with challenges and dilemmas, not least when you meet resistance or deep-rooted problems.

Sharing experiences and problems with ‘comrades in adversity’, either from your own organisation or from others, can be a powerful source of inspiration, learning and support to complement the other resources available to you in the Programme. Where a group of 5 or more people is participating from the same organisation, we will normally include Action Learning sets within the Programme. Sometimes we can also create Action Learning sets involving Programme participants from different companies.

Whether or not you are involved in an Action Learning set, you may find the method valuable as a means of supporting those leading change within your organisation. Our Guide to Action Learning provides guidance on how to set up and run an Action Learning set, and please contact the Programme Leaders for further advice.

You gain automatic membership of Fresh Thinking Labs, the international platform for knowledge-sharing between companies. Not only does the platform host all the learning resources, case studies and tools for the programme in a closed Lab, but it also offers an abundance of online resources and opportunities through the FTL Global Community. You can also make contact with other members and share good practice with companies and experts in several countries.

Take full advantage of the opportunities available through Fresh Thinking Labs to enhance your own learning and development, build personal networks and provide fresh insights for your organisation’s Action Plan!