Engagement

A key question in your Workplace Innovation Action Plan is “Who to involve?” Relevant stakeholders include people at every level of the company – front line employees, supervisors, line managers, senior management, board members and trade union representatives, all of whom may be affected but in different ways. They might also include customers, suppliers or even members of the local community. It is important to remember that people in each of these categories can offer valuable resources in terms of knowledge and commitment to change – or they can become serious obstacles.

Dialogue is central to engaging stakeholders. Thinking about change is often easier away from the pressures of day-to-day firefighting, hence the value of time-out sessions both for management and for front line teams (whether formal events or even meetings in the local pub!). Such sessions should explicitly avoid discussion of immediate issues and focus exclusively on the longer term horizon.

Personal networking can also be highly effective in engaging stakeholders. Building relationships with individuals at all levels of the organisation who are opinion formers, influencers or simply have an ear to the ground offers invaluable insights into potential issues, obstacles and allies.

Change often feels like a low priority when there are so many more immediate tasks to address. But delaying change may intensify the impact of external threats and offer a real advantage to competitors. Senior managers have a key role to play in making and protecting times and spaces in which dialogue about the need and potential for change can take place openly, inclusively and creatively.

Having identified and convened relevant groups of stakeholders, there will be a need to identify and agree principal targets and opportunities for innovation or improvement. In the Delivering Strategic Goals module, we show that workplace practices must be closely aligned with the organisation’s vision and strategy. For many employees, day-to-day experiences in the workplace provide the most tangible sense of an organisation’s ‘real’ values and direction.

The Workplace Innovation Diagnostic® is a proven survey tool for analysing the extent to which employees experience positive workplace practices, identifying targeted opportunities for improvement and innovation. Once the results are shared with employees, its value also lies in the potential to stimulate dialogue about the potential for change.

One of the simplest and most commonly-used tools is the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis, which can easily be conducted as a self-appraisal exercise. Allow different stakeholders to conduct their own SWOT since they will generate quite different perspectives depending on where they sit in the company.

Managers and employees at each level inevitably experience the company in different ways, and will have a varied understanding of where things are working and what can be improved. Employees’ stories and anecdotes about working life offer valuable insights into organisational culture and practice, and ‘collective remembering’ methods such as Group Recall are effective ways of building such an understanding.

Group Recall differs from traditional focus group methodology in that it doesn’t ask participants to address factual questions directly – rather it allows the ‘facts’ of the case to emerge from experience of day-to-day working life. Like focus groups however, Group Recall is relatively resource intensive. Nonetheless our experience over several years strongly suggests that this investment is amply repaid through the ability of the methodology to generate insight and understanding of complex patterns of organisational behaviour and practice.

The basic principle is that the reality of how an organisation works can be revealed by inviting peer groups of between six and ten employees to identify and analyse shared experiences – either specific instances which they have all experienced or more generalised aspects of day-to-day work. Rather than asking people to make abstract assessments of how ‘good’ an organisation is in terms of pre-defined categories (often the approach taken with traditional focus groups), group recall involves participants in analysing the causes and meanings of issues which arise in day-to-day working life.

Anecdotes therefore become an important starting point for analysing the hidden processes that take place at work. For example, instead of asking a group “Does this organisation respect the knowledge and experience you bring to the job” the researcher would ask “Can you give me an example of a situation where you felt good about having used your knowledge and experience to make a real contribution to the job?”, or conversely “Can you give me an example of a situation which made you feel that your knowledge and experience were being ignored?”.

The group can then be guided to analyse the factors which make the difference between the two situations, again grounded in actual experience of working life in the organisation. Transcripts of the discussion can be further analysed using methods which allow key themes to emerge from the data itself. Results can be translated into a practical action plan template, enabling users to create a focused strategy for sustainable change, linking specific recommendations to the company’s business strategy, growth and improvement objectives.

A shared understanding of needs and opportunities for change forms the basis on which a vision of the future organisation can be co-created by leaders, employees and other stakeholders. Without a shared and unifying vision, actions to improve performance or wellbeing can easily become fragmented and fail to achieve cumulative impact.

Allowing employees across the organisation the opportunity to be involved in the visioning process can enable diverse perspectives and aspirations to be blended into shared goals. Inclusiveness pays dividends in generating an abundance of actionable ideas, stimulating enterprising behaviours, and ensuring subsequent ‘buy in’.

Searching for ‘win-win’ outcomes is at the heart of a sustainable vision. The ‘win’ for employees is not necessarily financial but may be realised in terms of greater job satisfaction, enhanced trust and recognition, and healthier working.

In most organisations it is difficult to step back from everyday tasks to think creatively about new ways of doing things, or about how to make change happen. Formal time-out sessions are valuable  especially when considering major change thresholds, for example:

Dialogue (or Search) Conferences are a well-established way of creating productive dialogue between management, employees, trade unions and other stakeholders around longer-term challenges, strategic choices and their immediate implications. Change conferences begin by imagining a successful medium-term future, identify the obstacles to securing that future and how to overcome them, and develop an Action Plan.

Visions and strategies are only as good as the actions created to realise them. Action Planning is the process of stimulating that creativity in order to generate innovative yet workable change initiatives.

Workplace innovation draws on the knowledge, experience and commitment of managers and employees throughout the organisation. Ideas can come from anywhere, and everyone has the potential to be creative. In general, the broader and more diverse the representation of people involved in Action Planning, the more innovative and sustainable the solutions. People in different parts of the organisation will bring different perspectives and can reframe problems in ways that lead to more imaginative and comprehensive solutions.

Many people may not have had such opportunities or encouragement previously, and may need reassuring that it is ‘OK’. Senior management has to give the lead here, though people elsewhere in the line management chain also need to be delivering positive messages and creating specific opportunities for involvement by their teams in change. Relaxing or changing targets to create some ‘slack’ for involvement is usually an important factor. Trade union and employee representatives can also provide a valuable source of reassurance and encouragement.

Avoid the temptation to rush towards identifying actions – this is unlikely to generate fresh thinking and may only lead to the regurgitation of existing practices. Start with a free-ranging exploration of divergent ideas and solutions – in which no idea is a bad idea. Many possible solutions can be explored in a short amount of time, often making unexpected connections.

Common themes which link these different ideas can then be identified, eventually leading to convergence towards a single, consensual solution. The major underlying principle here is that the force of the better argument should prevail, no matter who makes it – a principle to which all participants should sign up at the outset.

Google’s Design Sprint methodology may also be useful as a process for the rapid generation and testing of ideas.

There are several methods available to identify actions that lead, for example, to improved efficiency or customer responsiveness across the organisation. Process modelling is one way of drawing on employees’ day-to-day experiences (and frustrations) to analyse current workflow, identifying (and sharing) good practices as well as obstacles and bottlenecks. This needn’t involve sophisticated tools and can be as simple as using sticky notes to identify each stage in the production of a product or service, using red markers to identify obstacles such as bottlenecks, insufficient collaboration, poor information flows or duplication of effort.

The four components at the base and pinnacle of the triangle represent forces that interact with each other to determine whether (or not) the action achieves its intended result. Step one is to ensure that each component is identified and aligned with the change process, for example:

• Tools and Resources: do key actors have access to the knowledge, skills and practical resources (including time and budgets) required to deliver the change?
• Rules: are all of the explicit and implicit permissions in place to empower and mandate key actors appropriately? This might include the authority to work across organisational divisions and to challenge silos, as well as the alignment of formal HR, Finance and other rules and procedures.
• Stakeholders: who will be affected and should be involved in the change? Who can add knowledge and insights, and who might become a blocker if not engaged effectively? Senior teams and employees (almost certainly), but perhaps also customers and suppliers?
• Division of Labour: who is best placed to deliver each part of the action in terms of their knowledge, prior experience, aptitude and/or position in the organisation? And how can you ensure overall co-ordination?

Step two involves deeper analysis of the alignment between each component. The figure below asks whether each stakeholder is playing a full and appropriate part in the division of labour with the tools and resources they require to do so:

Likewise the analysis can be undertaken on the relationships represented by each of the connecting lines within the triangle, both singly and in sub-triangles as in the above example.

Aligning the resources required to achieve successful change is central to Workplace Innovation Action Plans, and the results of this exercise can be transcribed onto your online Action Plan tool. The exercise is best undertaken collectively with the whole change team, ideally representing a cross-section of the entire organisation to ensure that different perspectives, opportunities and potential obstacles are recognised.

Employee-driven scenario planning is a highly effective tool for modelling potential change initiatives; for example, one Danish company built models and life-size floor plans to enable engineers to test their assumptions about the design of new plant with the people who will be operating it. Drawing on the tacit knowledge and experience of the operators, the exercise identified potentially costly flaws in the design and identified appropriate solutions.