Well I might be in Paris with all its attractions and distractions, including good coffee, haute cuisine - oh and the complexity conference of course - but it's a bit of news from back home in Britain that's caught my imagination today. The MacLeod Review of employee engagement, commissioned by the Department for Business, has said workers need to be properly involved in the future of their firms.
Author David MacLeod said he wanted to see people’s potential “unleashed” and said engagement was a key to innovation and competitiveness. Apparently the report’s authors were told during their research that “trust works two ways” and that not trusting staff had a negative impact. They were also told it was people, not machines, which made the difference to a business.
Responding to the report employment relations Minister Lord Young said: “Workers know better than anyone how the firm they work for can improve, innovate and succeed.”
f this all sounds familiar, that’s no surprise.There’s nothing radical, or even new, about this report. It’s what DNA Wales and complexity advocates have been saying for years. It’s what companies around the world – including many I’ve worked with - have been doing for decades.
Of course people are the key to a company’s success. Of course the best people to ask for a solution to a company’s problems are those within it and on the frontline. And it stands to reason that if you haven’t got everyone in the organisation fully behind what you’re trying to achieve, you’ve got less chance of achieving it.
The Government says it accepts the report’s recommendations and now there’ll be an action plan to deliver them.
Now that the message is becoming more mainstream, maybe those who run our organisations will forget their management tools, and constant ‘tinkering’ with the system and finally wake up to the fact that this is the only way to make them fitter for the future.
Let’s hope they don’t just pay it lip-service, and they actually do it.
Comments (2)
Paul,
When reading your summary of the reports conclusions I have to confess to one of those feelings that I get when similar reports are announced and reported on the news and that is
“Did they really need to pay someone to produce a report that is, to most people, common sense?”
The concern is always that if the powers that be are so dim as to not understand these fundamental truths in the first place how can we ever think that they might have the wisdom to do something about it?
Maybe I should read the whole report – but I have no reason to doubt your excellent précis
Regards,
Tim
Posted by Tim | July 21, 2009 10:54 AM
Posted on July 21, 2009 10:54
Sorry,
"The Government says it accepts the report’s recommendations and now there’ll be an action plan to deliver them." What does this crazy government think it is going to do?
The report will probably be abused as a sop to the unions.
What the govt. could do is to stop doing stupid things in industrial and academic funding i.e. things that are based on assumptions other than employee engagement being the basis of innovation. That would be real progress.
Posted by BrianSJ | July 26, 2009 2:51 PM
Posted on July 26, 2009 14:51