This week’s first posting explored why you need special meetings to define or refine your business culture around employee engagement. The second posting looked at how to make specific preparations for those meetings.
Today’s posting distinguishes three audiences for your meetings. We’ll look at reasons to keep them separate. We’ll offer suggestions for when you have to bring them all together for one mass meeting. Here’s information about how we distinguish our Culture of Engagement programs.
Who are those audiences?
Executives: those with title and authority, accountable to the shareholders, responsible for the Big Picture.
Leaders: those with either official authority or unofficial influence or both, accountable for the business’s workable structure and processes.
Managers: those whose authority and influence relate specifically to seeing that employees fulfill their assignments.
How (and why!) do Culture of Engagement meetings differ for these audiences?
The executive’s meeting — let’s call it a summit — works primarily by looking at the business culture. Executives initiate, revise, and maintain a business culture…if they are doing their job of keeping the company culture-focused. This meeting requires the broad vision of seeing short- and long-term and seeing the number of stakeholders who make up the business and their wants and needs.This meeting looks at how employee engagement can be the heart of that culture.
The leader’s meeting — a forum perhaps — is a roll-up-your-sleeves and sharpen-your-pencils session. Leaders participating in this forum apply the culture defined at the executive summit to the blueprint of the business structure and processes. All the while keeping employee engagement, the driver of the business culture, in their front of mind.
The manager’s workshop is the most hands on. Managers know how to direct, to motivate, to discipline, and to develop their people, all for the purpose of getting the jobs done. Those management skills are re-examined in this meeting, specifically to apply the lens of employee engagement. Managers are most directly responsible for driving real-time, front-line employee engagement. This meeting helps them assume them the definitions and the actions that make this possible in a culture of engagement.
When you can’t spare time for separate meetings, or if yours is a small business with people wearing multiple hats as execs, leaders, and managers, consider these tips:
- Clearly separate content modules. Gain clarity on culture: what it means, what it does, why it matters. Then build awareness of employee engagement and what it specifically means for your business and to your business. Finally focus on the how and what of combining culture and engagement. That’s probably enough for one full-day meeting.
- Work from an open agenda when you build the structure and process of your culture of engagement. Be ready for lots of brainstorming, lots of idea-testing, lots of mindshifting in this meeting, or this part of your meeting.
- Stress communication. Then stress communication more. Provide ample opportunity to discuss various communication: about business culture and its importance, about employee engagement as a driving success factor, about expectations of everyone at different levels and with different responsibilities to actualize your culture of engagement.
You may wish more info about my ready-to-roll Culture of Engagement programs.
Tags: Communication, Employee Engagement, Executive, Leadership, Management
