A look at how the Employee Engagement Project at the Ministry of Justice managed to create change for 80,000 staff that was \'By the People\', \'For the People\', and will hopefully never perish. This was first used as a workshop with Australian Public Sector executives in Canberra Feb 2011.
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The Ministry of Justice Story
Successfully? Herding Cats
a little about mev5 years in London as interim to UK CS, director, & school governor.v5 years APS exec.v10 years in business & management.
vMasters, postgrad stuff, & an undying thirst for knowledge.vCurrently creating books, resources, & podcasts.
a little about the team
Ainsley Allen‘The Don’
Kept us & the org leaders on
track & on message.
Peter Carl‘The Brains’
PMO & commslead. Knows
the news before it happens.
Rob Neil‘The Fixer’
Knew everyone & everything
about them.
the suppliers
CLAIRE & SALLY PHIL
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working for a just and democratic society
the strategic outcomes
the organisation
3rd largest Government
Depart80,000 people
£10 Billion budget
9 million + customers
900 + locations
Paul
Sticky Note
Also managed: Sudden procurement process that had previously taken 9 months, Bringing the project planning back on track as it was slipping uncontrollably to be out of sync with other org and CS requirements. 25+ working group members, 14+ Comms units, 7 separate secure networks that didn’t play nicely together, worked in a 3 week response period for the survey (normally 4-6 weeks minimum) and provided results within 5 weeks. It was tough – can everyone say ‘Awwwww’ in a patronising manner?
scalable success
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Everything I share today can be used in a tiny organisation as well as a megalith! One of the joys of the Employee Engagement agenda is that it is just as strong and effective in small groups as it is across entire sectors and huge organisations. It’s core is mainly based upon what any professional individual would do, and extrapolates that up in scale. Q - Who here is in a Big Organisation? A Comfortable Organisation? A Cozy Organisation?
the framework
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Briefings to present survey outcomes and ask ‘did we answer the right questions in our group?’ Action planning to be shared across the organisation to leverage ideas. Action plans to be reported on and used as a examples and part of the learning curve. This all seems very sensible and simple, except when you get people involved. Everyone knows that life would be a lot easier if people weren’t involved!!!
herding catsCats never behave how
you hope…Humans are even worse!
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Trying to get any group of individuals to work towards an ideal way of action needs to have many different approaches used. We couldn’t just hope everyone would do what they were told. Those days are probably long gone. We decided to try a few techniques that would have the cats keep coming back to the box by their own choice – mainly because it was their box! So we went where they were.
Might as well work on the cat’s level.
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We went outside the box – around the box – and eventually helped the cats to label their box ‘Mine’. All too often action plans belong to someone else. This new paradigm worked towards making the action belong to the individual, because it was theirs. It was what they said, what they decided to do, and how well they did it.
Mixing Metaphors
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Herding Cats, Gettysburg Address, Out of the Box Thinking – if workshops were measured by the number of metaphors used, then generations to come would be remembering today. Amongst all my yapping and reminiscing we’ll have…I’ve forgotten……(what do cats stand on?? How many of them do they have???) four “paws” to get your feedback and ideas on how you think you might apply any of these things we did to your projects or departments. If you think anything I am saying is total rubbish and you couldn’t see working under any circumstance in this or any parallel dimension, please pipe up as we go, and we’ll either stop to discuss it more, or add put it aside to be discussed at the end or in the next session.
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Employee Engagement IS another corporate top down initiative that will hopefully cure all ills. Big wigs decided it was going to be a focus, and therefore it was so. So how do we make this initiative (which at is core seems good for everyone) a success where so many before have failed. So many changes have caused the cats to scatter, or just lay there with that cat look of ‘try and make me’. We started by ensuring the agenda was developed By The People.
out of the box solutionsOver 100 tribunals staff
attend ‘Peak Performance’ theatre
workshops.
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Totally involving theatre workshops where a huge success where staff directed the cast on how best to solve team and organisational situations. Were unfortunately lost in budgetary issues and found it hard to justify to budget holders when held against other options for spending.
Involved large numbers of managers
to write ‘how to engage’ guides across
MoJ.
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Now we are talking about getting the best people for the job from across the organisation to take time out from their daily grind to spend a whole day training. Not an easy task when the group was mainly a mix of senior and middle managers. The Permanent Secretary, Sir Suma Chakrabarti, was ill that day – a flu that should have kept him in bed at home. He came in for one thing that day – this event. This level of Perm Sec involvement was very rare, and possibly a huge game changer. Many other departments left the EE agenda as a job for a quite corner of the HR department to worry about.
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Provided ultra valuable learning and discovery challenges that each champion could take back to use in their area as well as a deeper understanding of the process. The champions needed to be sharp as a tack to pick up and relay messages that were coming through the feedback loops from around the MoJ and further.
what wasn’t done…
Use social media.
Share the process.
Staff Life Cycle.
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Using social media to really gather and share ideas. Technology and ultra-conservatism limited us again!! Capturing and sharing the process across the organisation with mixed media. Probably shared more with other departments than our own! Too early to be a major part of branding, but could have been made a major part of the formal initiation process (was made an L&D module), used in performance management discussions, and definitely part of the exit process. Building a strong alumni group at all levels would have reinforced the MoJs devotion to keeping engaged staff even after they finish their employment.
PAWS #1
work around solutions100% transparency of
all results, action plans, and activities.
No media or union backlash.Competition between areas.
A buzz at every level.Activity became visible to all.
ONLY THE START OF THE DISCUSSION
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More people understood what was going on around them and would see a result and start asking questions. 15% point rise in response rates on the previous highest response rate.
PAWS #2
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This is 1/8th of the results for 1 of the 5 DSO groupings. Approx 100 questions (left hand side)– depending on the area (upto 10 divisional questions allowed), 249 subdivisions of Access to Justice!! (across the header row). Red dots = lowest ranking subdivision for that question (things to improve?). Green Dots = highest ranking subdivision for that questions (things to celebrate and share). 13b. My line manager: Encourages us to give feedback on his/her own performance Change Programme Management (with 19 responses in a team of 7!!) is amongst the 10 lowest scorers in my part of the organisation. Also bottom 10 in 13c. My line manager: Communicates effectively & 24b. My line manager: Is considerate of my life outside work & 46. I have received the training to do my job effectively. Q – WTF?? What To Facilitate!!!
instant experts
150 Local Facilitators
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So transparency wouldn’t be shrouded in misinformation, we trained 150 local facilitators who would be responsible for running or supporting senior staff in running Results Into Action workshops for their areas. We ensured they could quiry the results, ask the hard questions, and be able to move local groups towards meaningful action for their area. Results were a starting point.
So, tell me again, how does this ‘Engagement’ work?
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We really had to ensure that everyone was ready for the charge of information that was about to come at them. There would be the good, the bad, and the ugly – all needed to be addressed, all was being made transparent. There was no hiding.
instant experts
600+ Results Into
Action workshops
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Facilitators on average supported four workshops – this is a naff statistic as some would have only done one or two, others would have supported a dozen events and trained up many others to take the reigns in the future.
instant experts
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One thing we heard constantly and loudly is – “Please don’t give us any more to do!!!!” Staff (especially middle managers) were already flooded with change from all angles. We went totally reductionist and broke most info sheets down to 1 or 2 pages that answered obvious questions.
work around solutionsTruly flattened the
operational structure.
Not about cutting a few middle management positions, but
about engaging all positions in better sculpting the
organisation.
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More people understood what was going on around them and would see a result and start asking questions.
what wasn’t done…
Connect centrally.
Transparent action plans.
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1. Being able to connect centrally with those who were having trouble implementing the change or were against the whole idea. Small team, reliant on third parties (go to the source), lack of technology. Valuable feedback we missed to better get the message out!!
PAWS #3
embedded outcomesEmbed a new
language, expectation, and process.
£1bil cost cutting hack and slash initiative was launched as a reaction to economic fears. We
managed to get PEP on board.
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PEP – Performance and Efficiency Project
Silos started breaking down – offices in the same region started
talking & working together.
Engagement outcomes were included in Senior Executive
performance reviews… and by extension bonus payments!!
what wasn’t done…
Future Resourcing.
Measurement.
Machinery of Gov.
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Adequate and driven future resources not in place. Machinery of Government changes / whims are always a threat to intelligent organisational activity. There just weren’t the measures or technology in place to allow hard stats to be gathered. Many organisations are now showing how that can be done (NHS Trusts, Local Councils, etc) have the technology and devotion to both measure and meaningfully analyse the figures.
PAWS #4
What are the challenges 3 years on?• Massive downsizing
and more restructuring!• Need to manage
champion and leader turnover.
• Holistic vision still missing.
• Really need to embed ‘You Said, We Did’.
• No solid measures of connected planning.
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2009 Lows We failed to tell a good 'you said, we did' story on the back of the 2008 survey results. There was lots of anecdotal evidence that things were happening, but noone could really put their finger on what had happened other than they had met to discuss the results, and certainly not on the outcome they were looking for. We didn’t have a clear lead from the top of the office on what the corporate priorities were from the 2008 survey results. We had to go back to the starting blocks, and gain acceptance of a new set of core questions, and a new way of calculating the engagement index. There was a big risk engagement leads, champions and staff would be disengaged because they couldn’t compare directly with 2008, and couldn’t feed into the design of the question set which was set centrally to cover all participating Civil Service organisations. Just a few days before the survey went live, we learned there were no hard copies of the survey in prisons because despite assurances all was well, our contractors confessed they hadn’t printed the paper copies and hadn’t delivered them, and where they tried to deliver them, they couldn’t get them through the prison gates. The day before the survey went live, we learned that most staff in prisons couldn’t access the online version of the survey. Although we had instructed greenlisting of the link and had tested it and alerted the relevant IT folk that some testers were experiencing a problem, they didn’t take action soon enough.
What are the results 3 years on?• Champions Day #6 just finished – on a zero
budget!!
•Stream lined logistics.•Telling the “You Said, We Did” story more.•Increased Senior Leadership responsibility.•Engagement is up!
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2009 Highs We had hard copies and online access in prisons by the 4th working day of the survey. We asked staff to input a code to say where they worked rather than find themselves in a huge organisational ‘drop-down’ menu. Communication of the codes was largely successful and generated very few enquiries. We achieved a 56% response rate, which given the problems above we were pleased with. 2010 Highs We ran Leadership into Action sessions with the top teams, and arranged a session for the top Board to discuss emerging findings, and a further session to agree firm recommendations for corporate action. The Board took responsibility for action on the key driver of engagement – Leadership and Managing Change, set their direct reports a performance objective around raising engagement in this area, and agreed a process for reporting and monitoring whether action was being taken. Directors across three main parts of the Ministry reported at three points during the year on the action they were taking. They were in effect writing their own ‘You said, we did’ story. We ran a series of stories in our e-magazine from specific business units about what they were doing and the outcomes they were looking from. Running the survey in 2010, we enabled engagement leads in prisons to print their own copies of the survey in their own establishment two months before the survey went live. We therefore overcame the previous problems with relying on an outside contractor, delivery, and waste, as they could print what they needed. We worked very closely with IT colleagues to ensure online access for all staff was available and had been thoroughly tested before the survey went live. We could compare the 2009 and 2010 results, and see where we were improving. MOJ scored above the benchmark for its organisational size group, and was one of two central Departments where engagement went up. 2011 We’re on track for a challenging year in terms of realising efficiencies, but there is a real appetite for maintaining and raising engagement levels in many parts of the organisation. The team has real challenges in that the network of senior managers, engagement leads and engagement champions across the Ministry will change significantly with the restructuring and downsizing taking place. Our challenge is to ensure the baton is passed on. But we are in good heart and ready for this challenge.
