Workforce Engagement

Our workforce engagement approach typically involves the design and facilitation of a five-phased action learning process to help an organization’s managers and workforce jointly understand what improvements need to be made in its frontline work environment(s), and make the needed improvements through an engaging process of well-managed and genuinely participative organizational change.

The five phases of our action learning process for creating informed and meaningful workforce engagement in organizational problem solving and workplace improvement planning are as follows:

Data Gathering — collecting and examining data on organizational policies, systems, structures and practices in a collaborative problem-solving mode

Problem Diagnosis — evaluating the data in terms of the organization’s strategic goals and priorities and benchmarking it against best practices of human capital management

Data Feedback — presenting the data to organization members in a timely manner and giving them a chance to utilize this feedback to adjust their own actions or organizational processes

Action Planning — using the outcome of data gathering, problem diagnosis and critical feedback to formulate a set of specific action plans leading to a desired state or goal for the organization as a whole and for its frontline workplace(s) in particular

Action Programming — initiating and implementing change programs and monitoring and adjusting them as necessary to achieve the desired state or goal

Successful execution of this action learning process usually requires engagement of the organizational leadership team and one or more frontline manager-employee teams in a sustained repetitive cycle of reflection, planning, action and feedback.

By way of illustration, a typical sequence of these action learning steps is as follows:

1. Convene and facilitate a meeting of the organization’s leadership team to define and prioritize workplace issues and agree on next steps for resolving the most pressing of those issues.

2. Conduct one or more focus groups with frontline managerial and non managerial employees to make a preliminary assessment of the scope, content, duration and intensity of the organization’s workplace issues.

3. Review a detailed report on the focus group results with the organization’s leadership team and use the results to design jointly an on-going frontline workplace improvement program (some combination of Steps 4-11 below).

4. Convene one or more workplace improvement planning meetings of the organization’s frontline managerial and non managerial employees: to further define and prioritize the workplace issues; to generate practical options for resolving the most urgent and important issues; and to detail and document actionable proposals for implementing the most promising solutions.

5. Prepare a detailed report synthesizing and integrating the outcomes of the workplace improvement planning meetings, review the report with the organization’s leadership team, and encourage them to implement any of the suggestions surfaced in Steps 1-4 that they believe can be acted upon without additional analysis or elaboration.

6. Also encourage the organization’s leadership team to establish issue-specific workplace improvement teams and to task each such team with responsibility (over roughly a six-month period) for additional analysis of the priority issues in their respective topic areas and further refinement and elaboration of the tentative action recommendations for that area which were formulated in the Step 4 workplace improvement planning meetings.

7. Convene and facilitate simultaneous kick-off meetings of the issue-specific workplace improvement teams to explain their problem-solving role, clarify expectations, answer any questions, and get them started on the right track in a positive frame of mind.

8. Collect the workplace improvement teams’ reports (at the end of the six-month period) and assemble them in a well-organized briefing book, with a preface describing the chronology of events in the on-going workplace improvement process and describing the next steps in the process.

9. Convene a follow-up meeting of all the participants in the original workplace improvement planning sessions (Step 4 above) to review the detailed issue analyses and to prioritize the detailed implementation proposals of the issue-specific workplace improvement teams for subsequent review, decision making and action by the organization’s leadership team.

10. Submit the resulting workplace improvement program “implementation priorities” to the organization’s leadership team for review, decision making and subsequent action.

11. Encourage the organization’s leadership team to share their subsequent implementation decisions and actions fully and openly with all of the participants in the workplace improvement program planning and problem solving meetings described above.

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