Category Archives: High Performance Workplace / Great Place to Work / Employee Engagement

Treat your people like human beings, not human resources

Treat people like human beings, not human resources The success of any organisation depends on its people. Early management attempts to achieve organisational success were based on removing the variability of people’s behaviour by requiring compliance with rigid procedures, treating people essentially like robots, eg Fordism, Taylorism. It was eventually realised, thanks to the work [...]

The business value of a great place to work

One of John Kay’s columns in the FT  (March 24 2010)  tells the story of Nobel prize winner James Black, who was responsible for the development of highly successful drugs which made massive profits for the pharma industry, including ICI.  He had joined ICI because it offered a ‘stimulating and well-funded research environment’. For Black [...]

Can you engage and keep your best people? A free self-test

Questionnaire from Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc) ISBN 978-1-57675-557-0. Adapted and reproduced by permission of the authors. Learn more by visiting their website www.keepem.com.

So, how do you score? Here is how to make sense of the test and decide what to do next.

A national scandal

I want to bring to your attention a national scandal that you’re probably not aware of. That around a quarter of all employees in the UK are disengaged from their jobs, meaning that they have no interest in their work and even hate it. They make little or no contribution to the enterprises they work [...]

Corporate Governance at the Crossroads

The reform of corporate governance from Cadbury (1992) to Higgs (2003) was strongly influenced by agency theory. The reformers’ solution to perceived agency problems in countries with unitary boards was to prescribe rules for board structure, in particular by specifying the number and roles of non-executive directors (NEDs), and requiring the separation of the chairman [...]

Antecedents to employee engagement

Important Aspects of the Social Climate That Act As Antecedents to Employee Engagement. Reproduced from Engaged to Perform: A new perspective on employee engagement. Lancaster University Management School White Paper 09/04, May 2009. Shashi Balain and Paul Sparrow 1. The perception that the organization’s systems, procedures and ways of allocating resources (financial and non-financial) are [...]

The power of coaching and employee engagement

The power of coaching to bring about employee engagement and a big profit improvement was reported in the magazine Coaching at Work (vol 5/2). The Solaglas company said that their return on investment (ROI) on the coaching programme was   490 per cent, and that the project made overall savings of almost £800,000, including lower recruitment [...]

A Brief History of ROTA Management

Over 20 years ago a group of friends of which I was one founded a completely new company. We did so not only because we wanted to be millionaires, but because we were fed up with our existing employers. We made a list of all the things we disliked about companies we had worked for [...]

The Thinking Environment and Employee Engagement

In the years I worked as an entrepreneur, the nearest thing I found to a ‘silver bullet’ was getting our employees highly-engaged in our businesses. We did this by giving them our respect, being open with them, trusting them, and giving them autonomy. I call this ROTA management: respect, openness, trust, autonomy. Today, evidence has [...]